The LVN networking app for 14–24-year-olds lists hundreds of youth services and opportunities in one place. It makes it easy to find support, training, apprenticeships, and events of interest to you by area.
The London Village Network had one simple aim, to make a significant difference in the lives of young people.
John Radford, CEO at Launchbase
LVN was set up with the aim of asking professionals to offer one hour of their time to inspire young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and living in deprived communities. The charity’s mentorship programme features a diverse community of volunteers committed to providing all support available. We worked with LVN to develop a mobile app, aiming to tackle the product strategy alongside business-critical objectives. Our key insights found that youth groups had strong interests in specific industries but felt overwhelmed by the number of industries available. In contrast, volunteers were concerned they may not have the expertise or suitability to mentor young people.
During a 2-month agile design sprint, we guided the client from research, strategy to design, conducting research and user group sessions to identify pain points. The app was designed and prototyped within 4 weeks. During this iterative process, we worked with the client to validate the user experience and ensure our ideas were being tested by potential user groups. The app’s core functions provided a supportive tool for youth, volunteer, and youth worker registration. We developed a lean product flow, tailoring content and search features to match young people with the right opportunities and professionals in their local area. The development team built the app using Swift for iOS and Kotlin Android platforms, utilising the support to deliver a quality and cost-effective product for LVN’s needs. We also ran several user-based and automation-based test sprints to deliver a quality and robust working solution fit for scale.
We are incredibly proud to have worked with and invested in London Village Network and to have the opportunity to impact people in a positive way, build networks and inspire hope for the next generation. In 2019, London Village Network were ranked in the finals for Tech4Good which recognises organisations and individuals who use digital technology to improve the lives of others. The app now holds a 5 star rating and is used by thousands of young people and mentors across London. It has received several awards and been recognised by Jeremy Corbyn as a leader in the field of tech4good.
Launchbase have been exceptional! They fully understand our development needs. We are looking forward to continuing our great partnership.
London Village Network
