Week 16: Onboarding organisations
Things started to get real this week, as hundreds of NHS organisations have been onboarding to our service ahead of the start of the winter vaccination campaign.
A few months ago we took a strategic decision to avoid doing this manually via spreadsheets, and instead to build an interface.
This interface is now being used by staff at the NHS regions to invite organisations, triggering welcome emails sent out by GOV.UK Notify and Okta.
So far it’s working well!
Registers and autocompletes
Part of the onboarding interface involved integrating with the Organisation Sata Service (ODS) using their API.
Having an autocomplete backed by a definitive register of organisations is super valuable for avoiding data errors, but can be hard to do.
We’ve already made a couple of changes to improve the ordering and exclude closed organisations.
I’d love to see other digital services share their approach for autocompletes. Getting this component into a design system will save a lot of time in future.
Service navigation
Over in GOV.UK land, the design system team have published a new Service navigation component along with some guidance on how to help users navigate a service.
It’s a big change, as it moves the service name from the black header bar (next to the GOV.UK logo), down into a new service navigation bar, on a light grey background.
This helps to pave the way for the black header bar to include GOV.UK wide elements in future, such as the One Login navigation and sign out links.
Back in NHS land, we’ve also been looking at the header, and thinking about service navigation and sign out links.
In both lands there are some common semi-philosophical questions, such as what should happen if you click the logo top-left, and is this ‘one website’ or many?