We’ve made a deviation from our usual pattern of updates this autumn: this post is here to explain why we’ve changed the release schedule, and when you’ll be getting the other features you asked for.
Before January last year, Three Rings was used exclusively by Nightlines. Indeed, even today it’s used by virtually all of the Nightlines in the UK and Ireland, but by 2008 it became apparent that the system already did just about everything the Nightlines needed it to do. We’d barely had a support request in a year, and there didn’t seem to be any great list of requested features for us to introduce to the system. After the challenge of the past six years, the feeling of not having much to do didn’t sit quite right with the team, so we opened Three Rings up and began offering our services to Samaritans and to a select few other charities.
Since then, we’ve been taking on new branches on a regular basis. We keep a waiting list – no more than one branch per week, so to make sure that when a new branch starts using the system, they’re the only branch that’s brand new to the system. I don’t think any of us could say we don’t have much to do anymore!
Feature requests keep coming in, and as we’ve said before, we try to prioritise new features based on what will provide the most good to the most users. Each new release of the system is a mix of behind-the-scenes improvements, and more obvious changes that reflect the feature requests we’ve been given over the previous few months.
One feature request in particular has appeared two or three times recently. Three times isn’t actually that many for a feature request, but this one’s a bit different. As we’ve taken on more and more branches, the diversity of Three Rings users has grown. Back in 2007, the average user was a 21-year-old student, probably female, and slightly more likely to be studying psychology or English Literature than anything else. Today I have no idea what the average user is like, except that they almost certainly provide emotional support through a listening service of some sort.
For all that we’ve been doing our best to develop the features that do the most good for the most people, one type of Three Rings user was being left behind. As more branches came online, their volunteers became users of the system. And some of those users were blind, or visually impaired, and they found the system very hard to use.
Once we heard about this, we did what we could to patch things up: we shoehorned some extra features into Simple Version, which helped a bit, but it didn’t fix things. Of course, we wrote Three Rings to meet all of the web accessibility standards – we didn’t set out to fail our users on purpose – but there was still a lot of room for improvement. Standards-compliant though it was, working through a page of Three Rings using a screen reader took an unconscionably long time, and by the time you’d got to the bottom of the page it was often hard to remember what the first ten links had been.
We’ve been hard at work to fix this, and we think we’re almost there. Feedback from our alpha testers on the improved accessibility version of Three Rings has been very positive, and we want to get those improvements “out there” as soon as we can so we can improve the usability of the live site.
For this reason, we’ve taken the difficult decision to put back our next major milestone, Hafnium, to the New Year. In a few weeks time, we’ll put out a minor release (code-named G-124) aimed at addressing some of the difficulties which blind and visually impaired users have raised over the last few months.
I realise that this goes against our normal philosophy of prioritising the features which benefit most volunteers, but it’s in a very good cause: we love features that help lots of people because we love what Three Rings does: help you get volunteers onto phonelines. Since we became aware of the usability problems with Three Rings and screen readers, we’ve been concerned we might do the opposite, and make life just that extra bit harder for those unable to use the visual display. We volunteer with this project to help your volunteers stay on the phones and in the branch, and we want to keep it that way.
The normal majority-driven feature-led releases will be back at the start of 2011. In the meantime, thank-you for your patience whilst we try to make life easier for visually impaired volunteers at Samaritans branches – and elsewhere.