Mayor Attends Event to Thank Grwp Cynefin App Testers
Posted on 30 Jun 2023
Yesterday a celebration event took place at Grwp Cynefin’s Awel y Dyffryn site to thank their residents from Bala and Denbigh who, over the past 12 months, have been crucial in the design and testing of a brand new Book of You app that will launch UK wide in 2024.
Book of You, along with tech companies Red Ninja Studios and Cobalt Techno have been designing a new app that takes all the great features of our ‘Classic’ app, bringing it right up to date, with the chance amongst other things to add comments and conversations to photographs, make and record video calls within a person’s ‘book’, and log in using Facebook, enabling the user to upload photographs to their personal ‘book’ directly from their social media page.
The project was funded by UKRI’s Small Business Research Initiative whereby businesses were invited to come up with ideas to improve life and wellbeing for over 55 year olds as part of a healthy ageing challenge. Over the course of the year, we used ‘Human Centred Design’, which aims to make the app simple and useful by focusing on the users’ needs and requirements, to help design a brand new app by recruiting a team of testers – older residents at leading Welsh housing association Grwp Cynefin who over the course of the project, were able to offer valuable insights into what residents would like from an app designed especially for them.
As the app nears completion, we invited the residents along to a celebration event at Awel y Dyffryn where their support was recognised with a £50 Amazon voucher and a certificate of thanks from Book of You, presented to them by Mayor of Denbigh, Cllr Alyn Ashworth.
The next stage will be a ‘beta launch’ taking place at all Grwp Cynefin sites where we will collect feedback on the usability of the actual app itself as residents begin to use it and this will be followed by a full launch early in 2024.
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