Week 116: Trick or treat
It’s Halloween. I spent the evening zigzagging around the streets trick-or-treating with my kids. You might think of that as a tacky American cultural import, but I’ve come to appreciate it.
If you can overlook the fistfuls of sweets being eaten, I think it’s positive for public health too. The area is full of kids walking, learning where their friends and classmates live, and gaining confidence talking to their neighbours. It’s a fun vibe, and helps to build community connections. And there’s plenty of evidence that these social interactions are important for emotional and physical wellbeing.
Sketching for the App
This week I finished writing up my exploration of a ‘Get a test’ feature for the NHS App. As mentioned in previous weeks, the core idea in it is to have a single interface presenting users with the different options for getting tests, regardless of how they’re delivered organisationally.
I’ve been continuing to build sketchy prototypes, exploring tests, vaccinations, appointments, and how they all interrelate. It’s an interesting usability problem, but I’m increasingly thinking of it as a narrative one too: how can the App help people make sense of and explain to others their own health journeys?
Huddles
I’ve been attending more of the various ‘huddles’ this week than I usually have time to. These are recurring meetings set up by different combinations of teams for designers and researchers to come together and share a current problem or work in progress and ask for feedback. Attending gives me a glimpse into what other teams are working on, and I’ll usually try and offer some suggestions or relevant links.
In many ways they’re a poor substitute for the kinds of chats that used to happen in-person, but they’re better than nothing, and I’m grateful to those who put the effort in to keep these things going.
Links
- Patient data should be designed for patients too from Steve on my team is a great summary of where we’ve got to so far
- RAVS mission patch from Benjy celebrates 10 million jabs having now been recorded via the service I previously worked on!
- Meeting the needs of pharmacy chains from the RAVS team documents one of the last bits of design I did for them
- Lessons learnt from piloting a digital lung cancer screening assessment from the NHS lung health check team
- Improving bowel screening in prisons documents some important findings from research with prison populations
- Preparing to test children’s vaccination records with parents explains how careful language has to be used when describing patchy vaccination data
- NHS sets up Google Maps deal to support 111 service highlights a public sector procurement issue: having to pay a reseller for basic online services
- Inside TPP, the company that manages millions of health records from Leeds-based The Exchange (requires free registration)
- If we stop, we lose from Piccalilli argues why we still need human teachers in the age of AI
Happy Halloween!