Monday was the Beta kick off and our first steering group, it's great to get properly started.

In between meetings, we finished off the questions for the text-based service discovery service (we need to think of a new name for this!), Emma uploaded the mental health services we've catalogued so far into the CMS, and Beth and Cécile pulled together some draft posters to show our test participants.

Shortly after, we had a technical kickoff for the engineering team, and a session to select and flesh out the first user stories. We also mapped out the main risks we're concerned about.

We’ve done a lot of searching for best practice in interviewing users by text message this week and writing the discussion guide. The key things we want to find out from this round of interviews are:

• Does the service feel like a good alternative to talking to an adult?
• If it's automated, does that reduce its value?
• How can we introduce people to it?
• What do young people think of the types of questions and tone of voice?

We decided to use the Gov Notify service for the prototyped text service so we can send participants relevant questions based on their previous answers. We did a dry run of the test sessions, and then swiftly started our first two interviews! In the background, Derek and Tom worked on the first technical spike - CMS options and setup.

We made some slight alterations after the first few interviews; Emma and Josh updated the text service prototype so we can display relevant results to our participants, we tweaked the posters to be more descriptive, and refined the discussion guide based on what we learnt.

We haven't analysed the findings in detail yet, but the main things we've found seem to be:

• Yes, a text-based service discovery service is absolutely a good option if you're not ready to speak to someone.
• The fact that it's automated is better for some people (although not all).
• The questions and tone of voice went down really well, especially where we acknowledged that reaching out is difficult to do.