Week 102: Designing the digital tear-off strip
My new team did a kick-off this week, marking the start of an alpha phase of the work.
We’ll continue learning things – discovery is never done – but now we’ll start designing and testing different ideas, in collaboration with other teams, as well as investigating the technical options in more detail.
Our kick-off was held in person. We had sessions on our existing research, our goals for the alpha, our riskiest assumptions, and creating a stakeholder map.
My main contribution was to run a sketching session.
I printed out some examples of test results as they’re currently shown in the NHS App, as well as examples of the messages about test results, shown separately in a different section of the app.
The aim was to sketch, in low-fidelity Sharpie, some different ways to bring the 2 things together.
In explaining the task, I hit upon some new analogies.
Right now, it is as if you receive 2 separate pieces of paper in separate envelopes. The first contains a detailed table of your school exam results, broken down by subject. The second contains a letter telling you whether you got into the university of your choice or not, and what the next steps for enrolment are. They might arrive in your letterbox on different days, in either order, causing confusion and anxiety.
The simplest design solution might be to staple the 2 sheets together and post them in the same envelope.
The digital equivalent of this might be links between the 2 screens. This could be our MVP.
Another design option might be to merge the 2 things, and design a new single sheet of paper that contains both results and a summary of what this means and what your next steps are.
The challenge for this is that whilst it might make more sense in the moment, it’s less ideal for the longer-term view. You might file the sheet away in a folder for future reference, but the results could become harder to find as they’re cluttered together with enrolment information no longer relevant after you’ve long since graduated.
An analogue solution to this can be found in another classic of school information: the school trip letter.
In these, the top two-thirds of the letter contains the information you need to remember: the date, the times, the destination, whether they need to wear school uniform, and so on.
The bottom third is a tear-off strip. It contains a short form where you give permission to attend, say whether your child needs a school packed lunch or not, and tick if you’re able to attend as a parent volunteer.
The letter goes on your noticeboard, and the strip at the bottom gets returned to school. As well as saving paper, one nice advantage of this design is that you can see at a glance whether you’ve done the thing yet. Paper still intact? Must remember to do the form. Strip at the bottom missing? Ah good, we’ve done it.
It’s not perfect (school bags are not 100% reliable postal systems), but it generally works.
How can we design a digital equivalent of the tear-off strip? Test results that are shown alongside good explanations and next steps, but where the next steps section changes over time. The button to book a follow-up appointment gets replaced with the details of that appointment once booked. And then perhaps replaced in turn with the outcome of that appointment, which might have its own next steps.
Over time, this might evolve into an interface which treats test results and appointments not as one-off transactions, but as part of an ongoing relationship journey between the patient and the NHS.
This is what our sketches started exploring.
There’s no way I can stay up into the early hours, so I’m hoping to wake up to news of an England win instead.