FixIT Is Live: Report a Housing Repair Without a Word of English

Built with Barnardo’s NI through Techies in Residence. Pick the room, tap the problem, add a photo, and the landlord gets a clear report in English.

Published on December 07, 2021

FixIT is live. If you are a refugee family in Belfast with a dripping tap, a dead smoke alarm or damp in the bedroom, you can now report it to your landlord at fixit.rentals without writing or speaking a word of English.

A phone showing the FixIT start screen beside a FixIT QR code card, with the Add Photo and No Evidence screen alongside — Scan the card, choose a language, report the problem.

It has taken most of the year. Here’s where we got to and what we learned.

A quick recap

FixIT started as a Techies in Residence project with Barnardo’s NI Refugee Support Service, through the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland and funded by Comic Relief. We pitched it at the showcase in May, and after the showcase Barnardo’s went on to secure seed funding to take it from prototype to something a family can actually rely on.

The problem hasn’t changed: reporting a housing repair assumes you can phone a repairs line and describe the fault in English. For families resettled here from Syria, and increasingly from Afghanistan, that isn’t a small hurdle, it’s the whole hurdle.

How it works

Open the link (or scan the QR code), choose your language, and then it’s pictures all the way down:

Which room? Kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, living room, or “everything else”.
What’s wrong? Each room has its own set of icons: hob, cooker, fridge, smoke alarm, damp, window, toilet, shower, taps.
Show us. Add a photo if you can. If there’s nothing to photograph, tap “No evidence” and carry on.
How do we reach you? Email, phone or WhatsApp, plus the postcode and address.

FixIT language screen with Start buttons in English and Arabic — Where every report starts: pick your language.

That’s it. FixIT sends a structured report, in English, to the landlord or managing agent. The tenant doesn’t translate. The landlord doesn’t interpret. FixIT is a conduit. It passes the message on and gets out of the way.

Three things we got right, one we got wrong

No account. We were tempted to add logins so a family could see their history. We didn’t, and I’m glad. Every extra screen before “which room?” is a family who gives up and rings the support worker instead.

WhatsApp as a contact method. Obvious in hindsight. It’s how families already talk to each other and to the services around them.

Boring technology. FixIT runs on a plain, well-supported stack that a charity can host without a developer on retainer. A residency product has to outlive the residency.

What we got wrong: we underestimated how much of the job is the words, not the code. Every icon needs a label in every language, every label needs checking by someone who actually speaks it, and the terms and privacy notice need translating properly rather than machine-translated. We’re launching with English and Arabic and have built it so that adding a language is a translation job, not a development job. But it is still a job.

What’s next

Barnardo’s have a list, and it’s a good one: video as well as photo evidence, research into what actually happens between landlord and tenant once a report lands, automated “how to” guides for the small fixes a tenant can do themselves, and the groundwork for other refugee services across the UK and Ireland to use the same tool.

If you run a refugee or housing service and want to try FixIT with your families, get in touch. And if you were one of the people who voted for us in May, thank you. This is what it turned into.