Our customers have been collaborating with us from the start of QL Yuneo’s development journey, using our senior leaders’ strategic workshops as part of a pioneering programme to give our UX/UI experts and product owners an insight into our customers’ aspirations.
The strategic workshops involve CEOs and directors as well as expert users, enabling strategic and operational alignment to future-proof our housing management system by considering exactly what customers need. In particular, we were keen to involve housing providers of all sizes to give us a broad view of the market during the development of our QL Yuneo SaaS-based housing management system.
Collaborative development
QL Yuneo’s collaborative engagement began early on with a presentation of internal reviews and wireframes. Gathering feedback from stakeholders and collating evidence from other projects and experts in the business ensured we involved all the right people from the start.
Features and improvements were then reviewed with customers so that we could tweak the designs and prioritise the backlog to aid the development process.
This continuous delivery model, using an agile methodology, ensures that QL Yuneo can be developed, delivered and maintained more efficiently. By involving customers in the development process, software suppliers like us maximise overall customer value. Customers are more involved in the future roadmap of the solution as well as getting more immediate value than with more traditional approaches.
The introduction of agile working is by no means a quick transition, requiring a cultural change and the involvement of all stakeholders from the start. Teams permanently collaborate to define, validate and introduce new services as the need arises, in turn also helping housing providers to be more agile and digital themselves.
New look and feel
One of the most noticeable outcomes from the engagement workshops was a completely new user interface. It was clear to our UX/UI experts that it was time to bring QL into the modern world of SaaS-based user interfaces by focusing on users’ journeys to ensure long-term benefits for the staff using the software day in, day out.
While UI changes can make some users feel nervous at first, it’s a positive cultural change. With the more intuitive, modern screens, users can navigate and complete daily tasks with minimal effort and training.
Offering better value
We are driven to deliver solutions that customers truly need and that can add real value from day one.
Customer engagement is key to ensuring that what is developed is right for the market, so working closely together with customers is important in ensuring the next generation of housing management systems is right for customers today and scalable for a sustainable future tomorrow.
The importance of customer engagement workshops and programmes like these is to ensure they are not just a one-off event but ingrained into the day-to-day development process of our product portfolio. To that end, that’s exactly what we have also been doing with our other developments this year, the Aareon Versaa Platform and Versaa Mobile Worker Modules.
If you are interested in finding out more about how our customers are directly involved in developing solutions to meet their own needs, please visit aareon.co.uk/solutions.
Neil Ward is the QL Yuneo solution manager at Aareon.
