When the website is the service: a free public e-mental-health platform
Someone decides to do something about how they have been feeling. They do it at 11 at night, on their own phone, with nobody else in the room.
There is nothing else there to help:
- no reception desk
- no waiting room
- no one on hand to explain what the next screen means
Whatever the software does, or does not do, is the whole experience.
That changes what the engineering has to be good at. A service like this holds sensitive personal information about members of the public, so protecting it is not a compliance step near the end of a project. It is the fact every other decision gets read against.
The platform also has to keep working for years at a time, because the people using it are partway through something, and it has to stay current while the technology underneath it keeps moving.
Our part in the work: Drupal engineering and technical leadership since 2017
The service is run by a university's national research centre and delivered by a partner agency, which has looked after the platform for more than a decade. The agency engaged us as their engineering partner, and we have worked alongside their own developers ever since.
The services we provide are:
- technical leadership
- Drupal(Opens in a new tab/window) development
- platform engineering
- ongoing maintenance
We are one part of a long-standing team rather than the whole of it, and for a platform this specialised that is the right shape: the agency holds the deep product knowledge, and we bring engineering depth, architecture and delivery process to the work that needs them.
For a client, that reads as added depth rather than a handover: the people who know the product keep it, and the engineering practice arrives around them.
What the public gets: registration, self-assessment and structured programs
The service is free and open to anyone. A person:
- registers
- completes a self-assessment
- works through structured online therapy programs at their own pace, with the option of support from a therapist
Progress belongs to them: months of self-reported wellbeing turn into a chart, which is often what makes the effort feel worth continuing.
The programs, the clinical content and the assessments behind them belong to the centre that created them. Our work is the platform they run on.
A research platform for the same centre: a multi-site study of online interventions
The centre's work is not only public-facing. We also built a separate platform for a multi-site research study of online interventions, and delivered the whole of the engineering on it.
On it, participants:
- registered
- worked through structured programs
- took part in moderated discussion
- spoke with an online coach
Researchers could take the study data out themselves in the shape they needed, rather than asking a developer to fetch it.
The study, its design and its findings belong to the centre and its research partners. What we can say about the software is that it carried the study.
Kept current across 9 years: hosting moves and major Drupal upgrades
Across 9 years the work has spanned 4 platforms built for the same client from a shared foundation, so each new one could start from tested ground rather than from nothing.
That habit of productising delivery is the same idea we later packaged and published as Vortex(Opens in a new tab/window), our open-source Drupal project template, and several of the testing tools we wrote for this work are open source too.
The service itself has been running for over a decade. In that time it has:
- moved hosting twice
- come through several major versions of Drupal
- begun the current major upgrade, which is underway
We planned that upgrade in 2 phases so the preparatory work could ship on the live platform first and give a stable, tested baseline to upgrade from, which means nothing in the first phase is wasted if the second one moves.
4 platforms from one shared foundation, across 9 years on a public service that has run for over a decade.
We are also asked to shape work before it is built. The habit that pays for itself is putting a specific list of questions to the client before estimating anything: on the current upgrade, 7 questions and 7 straight answers took work out of the scope before a line of it was quoted.
For a client, that reads as scope removed before it is bought: the questions get answered before the estimate is written, not after the work has started.
For platforms that have to outlast the technology under them
Everything on this page is 4 of our services running on one long-lived public service: technical leadership, Drupal development, platform engineering, and the ongoing maintenance that keeps a decade-old platform current.
If you run a public health service, a university research platform, or any service where the software is the whole of what a person gets, this is the shape the engagement takes: an engineering partner working alongside the team that already knows the product, upgrades planned in phases that each stand on their own, and questions answered before anything is estimated. The same engineering is available with AI-assisted delivery where it suits the work, at the same standard.
If your platform holds personal information about members of the public and is now several major versions behind, tell us what it would take to bring it current.