Week 104: The meta and the material
Last week of term (for my kids at least), and summer holidays are fast approaching.
Communicating the discovery
A lot of my team’s time this week was spent communicating what we’ve learnt so far to other teams, in various forms.
I don’t need to summarise it here, as Ralph and Jeannie have written a design history post: Helping users do more with their results, so you can go read that instead.
Steve and co have also polished up a discovery ‘deck’, which was presented in a show and tell, as well as a long-form report.
My main role was to demo the early prototype I’ve designed. I was a little nervous of this, as it’s full of untested and speculative ideas. I’m avoiding the term ‘provocatype’ but have instead taken to calling it an early sketch. It’s a rough outline of how test results might become a first class object within the NHS app, with notifications, unread statuses, and next steps. I prefixed the demos with a ton of caveats – not least that achieving this will require some significant infrastructure changes – but also hoped that it’d sell our bigger vision.
I think it’s been well received so far. The alpha stage is where we’ll really start to iterate, in collaboration with other teams responsible for the individual services.
Away day
Midway through the week was the summer event for digital prevention services, held up in Leeds.
The keynote speaker was Paul Jones, the Chief Digital Information Officer at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. He spoke passionately and openly about the challenges of managing the hundreds of digital services that the hospital trust relies on, as well as highlighting a bunch of innovative tech projects the hospital has pioneered. What struck me most was how fiercely IT had to compete with other local priorities for funding, and how financial constraints were limiting the ability to modernise aging services. A reality check.
The away day also included sessions on our achievements from the past 6 months, as well as a ‘fail fest’, giving us time to reflect on previous mistakes we’d made, and how we can better create an environment where learning from failures (or ‘falls’, to use the suggested rebranding) is accepted and celebrated.
The day was also a chance to catch up with colleagues, and meet some new ones I’d not seen in person before.
Accepting the meta
Back in London we had a team retro, where I admitted that I struggle a bit with ‘the meta’ of agile planning and delivery. Steve and Jamie are really good at this stuff, and I do not doubt its value – particularly in these early days where we can otherwise feel like we’re grasping at straws.
I can’t always get my head around riskiest assumptions, problem statements, hypotheses, and dare I say it, even user needs. My mind instead races off to think about the details of design and implementation.
But taking a step back can be wise before diving in. We need a balance between the meta and the material.
Links
- The GOV.UK Design System team added the Interruption page pattern this week. I helped with this a bit, as we published it within the NHS design system recently, but it was a cross-government effort.
- Stay put, or keep moving? by Dan Bower identifies a conflict in gradients between clinical and digital worlds in whether keeping moving is the safest option or not.
- Testing ‘one thing per page’ in practice from Michael Watson discusses how the much-maligned one-thing-per-page guidance is being applied to questions about smoking shisha.
- Finding a jump-off from Mike Gallagher articulates how the NHS App is currently a menu of disconnected services, and needs a new narrative to describe exactly how it might become something more coherent.
World Cup was fun. I let my 6 year old stay up for the final. Viva Espana!