Week 10: Jabs in arms
Highlight of this week was definitely a day trip to Somerset to observe the service I’m working on being used at covid-19 vaccination event in Frome.
It was fantastic to be able to see the whole process, and all the different systems and people involved.
I learnt a lot, including a whole bunch of contextual things that you wouldn’t pick up on in a remote usability testing session.
As ever, there was some friction caused by digital services that don’t talk to each other. A hard one to solve but there are plans in the pipeline.
The NHS staff running the vaccination event – and a volunteer too – were real stars, and very generous with their time in answering all my questions.
Headers
We’ve had some more good cross-NHS chats about the design of the Header component and how it could support a ‘logged in’ view.
It might sound trivial, but there’s some decisions to make. Should it say ‘sign out’ or ‘log out’? Should it look like a button or a link? What about about a link to an account or profile view? Should these go top-right, or in the main navigation? Icon or no icon? And so on.
Similar discussions are being had by the GOV.UK Design System team, who did a show and tell of their work-in-progress this week.
With more and more digital services becoming personalised and longer-lived than a one-off transaction, this design work is essential to improve consistency.
Fixed deadline, variable scope
The process of cutting scope to hit a fixed deadline can be quite brutal (yet necessary), so a big shout out to product and delivery folk who’ve navigated this.
I agree with Steve Messer who commented:
Fixed time, variable scope is such a healthy habit to nurture.
But it’s still hard.
We have to keep reminding ourselves that a launch is the start not the end.
Acronyms of the week
- Systemized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) – an international list of codes for medical terms, containing everything from “lice comb” (462583007) to “heart transplant” (32413006)
- EMIS (originally ‘Egton Medical Information Systems’) – this is both the name of a digital product widely used by GPs and the company who makes it
- Role-based access control (RBAC) – this mostly seems to be an overly-complicated way of referring to permission systems
Never mind the football, I’m looking forward to the Tour de France starting this weekend!