"Wow! Primero is looking good!"
One of the great joys of software development is seeing and hearing users react when you push a new release. A year ago, we first launched Primero v2 with the ambitious goal of creating a world class software as a service (SaaS) for the protection and social welfare sectors. At that stage, thousands of users were relying on Primero v1 for their everyday work and we'd gathered plenty of great user feedback. It's difficult to overstate the value of that experience. Real users providing real insights. That is invaluable, golden stuff. A clear product roadmap emerged. Exactly what we needed to take the next big step on our journey.
We got to work with our tech partners and some top notch UX/UI designers to reimagine Primero. The first iteration of Primero v2 had a lot of nice improvements. We got ourselves a new look and feel, a new tech stack with plenty of new capacbilities and better security, and online/offline functionality to meet the demands of the challenging contexts we work in. But perhaps most importantly, we got a progressive web app (PWA) with a new way of working and evolving the platform.
Progressive web app --> progressive enhancement
We are now finding our groove with Primero v2 and our SaaS infrastructure. Being able to continously develop new features and share them with all of our users is such a fun way to work. A steady flow of new stuff. What could possibly go wrong?
Progressive enhancements sound like a great idea. But it requires a major shift in the way we work. Behind the scenes, teams of developers, designers, business analysts and devops engineers are spending hundreds of hours observing, speccing, building and testing. All on a single codebase that needs to serve thousands of unique users in dozens of different programming contexts. This new model demands that we improve our release process to make certain that our teams know what is coming, how to test and enable new features, and how to permission and promote features from sandbox to production. It requires us to all be in sync, communicating effectively, documenting clearly, providing feedback, and responding to issues in a timely way. For a small team, it is a lot to manage, but the results are more than worth it.
Good design is a journey, not a destination
Progressive enhancements are great! Every so often, as a reward, we get to do a BIG DROP of new features and functionality and see how our users react. With v2.2 we have a range of new features including a new user interface with a long list of accessibility features implemented. New, smoother field navigation with even fonts and better contrast. Changes to form and fields that make the app interface more intuitive. A fixed banner and an updated color palette. A new activity log feature to keep track of changes to the record over time. More granular roles, better in-app messaging, and the first iteration of our new skip logic feature. It's a big bag of goodies! To follow our development you can check in with the Primero Support Hub "Releases" tab here.
Go ahead.... Try Primero
The best way to keep track of things is to try them! We invite you to use the "Try" Primero feature on the Hub's main page. Let us know what you think!
We are constantly reassessing and adding to our roadmap and reprioritizing features based on how our users are responding and demand from the field. We've started a bunch of exciting work on extending skip logic and data entry features, new statistics and analytics features, more dashboards, and new KPIs.
We've come a long way this year, and we've got some great work queued up for 2022. Join the conversation and help us deliver on the promise of Primero.