We were excited to have one of our final pre-pilot meetings today with our pilot partner, the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley. We have a coded-up version of our web app, to enroll litigants in a program to receive messages, create templates and schedules for messages, and review what messages are in the queue to be sent and what have already been sent.

A screen capture of setting up a template for the messages that would be sent

Setting up the user’s details that will let us send customized messages to them

Our client was overall happy with our first version of the app, but requested some specific features and workflows to make it work smoothly in their current office routines:

• One-click addition of users to system: remove the need for clerical workers and lawyers in the office to manually enter details about the clients into the messaging system’s database — rather, figure out a way to scrape their current case management system (which has all these details, but not in a usable way) to get this client info into the messaging system with one-click
• Simplifying choices: don’t offer too much choice in what message ‘templates’ to offer, or timing schedules to offer – instead have one, maximum two templates to choose from

With these proposed changes, we’ll go back to our development and design work, to get the app and system ready for our partner to use for a 3-month trial run. We’ll see in this run what bugs to fix, features to add, and outcomes become clear. Onward!