SA Government
My Voice, Our Views (MVOV)
South Australian Government
Department of Child Protection - Survey Platform
The Department for Child Protection South Australia (DCP) works to keep South Australia's children safe by protecting them from abuse and harm, and providing alternative care for children and young people when living at home is no longer an option.
DCP released a public tender in 2022, looking for a suitable survey tool to help collect, analyse, and report on the views of children and young people in their care - the tool was called “My Voice Our Views” (MVOV), a name chosen by DCP’s peak young person’s group.
MVOV was co-designed with children and young people and is an engaging tool that captures their voices and gives children and young people in care an opportunity to share their feelings and opinions. The survey tool is for children and young people aged between 5 and 17 years who have been in care for three months or more and is an additional mechanism for DCP case workers to capture what is important for a child or young person, what is going well, and what may need to improve or change.
The challenge.
DCP required a highly configurable survey system, that worked seamlessly on mobile devices and computers and allowed children to answer surveys, DCP case workers to review and comment on, and flag survey responses as requiring further action, and DCP administrators to create and edit surveys, and also view reports and metrics on the actual survey results.
As the survey was filled out by children in the care of DCP, specific UI and UX considerations needed to be taken into account, namely:
- The design needed to be simple and intuitive to use, and appropriate for use by children from the ages of 5 to 17 years of age
- Customisable themes, animated avatars, and short entertaining games were needed to help make the survey a fun experience
- Speech-to-text was required for dictating survey responses
- Text-to-speech was required for listening to survey questions, and the responses entered
- Text translation was required to ensure users could read a question in their own language
Along with this, integrations needed to be built to support data from the Department for Child Protection's key corporate system and data warehousing systems.
Project Workshops and Design Thinking
Once awarded the tender, we worked closely with DCP to clarify and refine the requirements of their system.
We ran detailed scoping workshops using human-centred design principles to ensure we were best meeting the needs of the end users, and that Atlasopen truly understood the needs and wants of the people involved.
Alongside DCP we created personas for each user in the system and then discussed all system features from the point of view of these users. We then mapped all features into user stories and then worked together to come up with a set of “acceptance criteria” for each of the stories - which once met would achieve the goals required.
Through these scoping workshops, we refined the system features, with some new requirements popping up, and some original requirements being moved out of phase 1.
We also worked closely with the Department for Child Protections technical team - understanding their integration requirements, and developing API schemas to ensure the systems would all be speaking the same language.
Need a flexible survey and data management collection platform?
Software Delivery Methodology and Platform
Development of the project consisted of multiple 2-week sprint deliveries, ensuring that there were testable features deployed regularly, and feedback from DCP could be incorporated throughout the entire project lifecycle.
For the base of the project, we leveraged our survey platform SurveyAtlas, but provided the configurations and customisations required to meet the exact needs of DCP.
The SurveyAtlas platform provides
- The ability to create different survey types, consisting of different questions and styles
- A easy-to-use survey editing tool, supporting many different question types
- Question logic and branching, allowing customised questions depending on previous answers
- Survey versioning, allowing changes to surveys to not affect the historical data integrity of previous versions
- Respondents to answer surveys using a mobile or desktop based web-browser
- The ability for respondents to optionally complete further surveys once the central one has been answered
- A detailed reporting dashboard showing charts, graphs, and metrics
- An ad-hoc data query tool - allowing survey data to be filtered and exported in multiple document formats
- Manager users to view and report on a subset of recipients (was used for DCP Case workers)
- The ability for Administrative users to configure and manage the system
- A detailed roles and permissions system
- Security user login using Azure Active Directory authentication
Summary
The successful collaboration between the Department for Child Protection South Australia (DCP) and Atlasopen in developing and implementing the "My Voice Our Views" (MVOV) survey tool marks a significant milestone and provides an engaging platform for children to express their feelings and opinions, empowering them to actively contribute to their own well-being and the improvement of child protection services.
Atlasopen is looking forward to working with DCP long into the future and helping support DCP's dedication to safeguarding the future of South Australia's children and promoting their rights as key priorities.