It was great connecting with you all and thank you for your active participation and engagement at our May 2022 CHT Round-up call. Please find attached the call recording and the summarized notes from the call.
Agenda 1- Community story from the Guild Digital team on their recent VHT AHA deployment at Kyaka II Refugee settlement in Uganda.
Agenda 2- Care team and Allies team product updates
a) Care team update
The care team recently conducted a field visit in Uganda, during the visit the team interviewed 30 users consisting of BRAC project Community Health Practitioners (CHPs) and MOH-UG Village Health Teams (VHTs). The team also conducted usability tests and focused group discussions with users to gauge the intuitiveness and learnability of potential UI/UX updates to different aspects of the CHT primarily around navigation. The changes that were tested included: changes to headers and testing floating out navigation feature.
Generally, the CHT updates were well received by users and often found easier to use especially by users with higher tech literacy. Some users struggled with new concepts but they were able to learn the introduced changes within the first interactions with the prototypes. While in the field the Care team also facilitated 15 generative interviews which helped to uncover insights and behaviour the team would not have been able to uncover without watching users interact with the CHT. The behaviour and insights uncovered included: users accidentally closing the app several times due to back button behaviour and users having to tab on app components/buttons several times before the intended action is performed.
The Care team will share the consolidated findings of the field visit on the forum, the team is looking forward to using the learnings to improve users experience. Please reach out to the Care team if you would like to work with the team to test some of the product initiatives or share with them any CHT product feedback that you have.
b) Allies team update
The Allies team will be conducting generative interviews to help them get insights about the challenges users experience when building applications. The team is interested to hear from App Admins, App Developers, implementing partners and Data Scientists and they will be reaching out to these users to schedule a call with them to learn more about how they can improve the CHT app building process.
Agenda 3- CHT core product and CHT android updates.
a) CHT sync
The team has been building a new product pipeline called CHT sync which will replace couch2pg, this pipeline will support data streaming from couchDB into the postgres database. The new dashboard set up utilizes proven stable open source technologies logstash and PostgRest that supports faster data processing and stability of the pipeline. With the new pipeline it will be easier for App builders to develop dashboards; using DBT a set of standard dashboards have been created which will be released and can be configured into Superset. Users who adopt this product pipeline will have access to the dashboard examples and this will make it fairly simple for them to make data modifications.
The community will be informed once the first release of the product pipeline is out.
b) CHT core product releases and updates
CHT v3.15 was released on May 5, 2022. The version has the following bug fixes, improvements and features:
- Faster loading of the app for users on weak internet.
- Ability to record form versions.
- Supports Bikram Sambrat dates for Nepali date system which allows users to capture accurate data.
- CHT v3.15 release notes are available here.
Updates on CHT v4.0.
- CHT core v4.0 will have the ability to scale horizontally to be able to support more users.
- Enketo core will be upgraded to 5x branch, this will allow CHT to be compliant with ODK forms. App Developers will be able to configure more features and widgets that newer versions of Enketo offers.
- Tests done show that it is possible to upgrade from any version of CHT v3x to v4.0x. All forms should work, but it is recommended that partners do the regular level of tests before the upgrade, the product team hopes to make the upgrade process as easy as possible. All changes and the upgrade process will be documented.
- Here are the 20 planned features and bug fixes for CHT v4.0
c) CHT android 1.0.0
CHT android is the android wrapper that is on the device that hosts the CHT application. The CHT android (for android version 9.0 or less devices) has a Crosswalk library that packages the old version of Google Chrome, with CHT android 1.0.0 the Crosswalk will be dropped and everyone will switch over to the new Chrome version. Depending on how the newer Chrome version is set up, it will be possible for the Chrome version to keep on updating automatically. Devices with newer versions of Chrome will be getting performance and security fixes that come with new releases of Chrome, older CHT android versions are using older versions of Chrome therefore the devices do not usually get updates. With the CHT android 1.0.0, users that have android version 9.0 or less devices will switch to using the latest Chrome version.
CHT core v4.0 is compatible with CHT android 1.0.0. With the required compatibility update and android 1.0.0 update, the Product team is aware that it might be a challenge for various deployments to distribute the updated CHT android releases on time. The Product team would like to therefore request that Partners reach out to them so that they can support them to roll out the android releases within the timelines that work for them.
We hope to see you again at the next CHT Round-up call on June 9, 2022.