We’re six months into our Fellowship, and for this month’s project update, we decided to take a step back to remind everyone how we got here.

Let’s recap

We’re working on a test called the eMIB (electronic managerial inbox) that has a very different set of requirements from every other test currently being offered by our government partner (the PSC).

What makes it so unique, you ask? There’s some very broad product requirements that shape how and why we made certain technical decisions. The eMIB must…

• Simulate the look and feel of a real inbox
• Task oriented, open-ended sets of responses
• Scored by humans, not machines
• Must meet accessible, modern web standards
• Browser-based to be compatible with the long-term vision of remote supervised testing (RST)

Because one of the Commission’s long-term goals is to offer remote supervised testing (testing taken on a candidate’s home computer or in a remote government office), the system needs to be browser-based. Unfortunately, that meant nothing the PSC currently offers would work for eMIB.

That’s where CAT, the Competency Assessment Tool comes in. CAT is the system that’s hosting the eMIB, and it’s completely new. It represents an opportunity for the PSC to offer a fully-accessible web-based test, built in our modern, newly-approved Technical Stack read our proposal here.

Building a new system meant that in addition to the candidate-facing view (in this case, the test) we also need to build things in the back-end, like somewhere to store test results, a login and account management system, admin tools, among other items. A new system represents an opportunity to also streamline and improve the experience for those administering the test, through more user-friendly admin tools. We’ve been working across departments at the PSC to better understand what people want, and we’ve learned a lot that we’re excited to start implementing.

We’re about halfway through our build phase, and now we’re starting to split our development work into a few streams:

• Polishing up inbox features based on findings from product testing
• Setting up logins and accounts
• Accessibility fixes

In our next post, we’ll talk about how product testing is affecting these build items, and why it’s important to test with real users, especially where accessibility is concerned.