Week 21: Progressive enhancement
I spent two days with our team in Leeds at the start of this week. It was a great chance to talk through our future roadmap, to have an in-person retro, and to do a bit of collaboration around a whiteboard.
The highlight was a team trip to a local maternity ward to talk to some of the team who are using our service to record the new RSV vaccinations given at 28+ weeks of pregnancy.
Speaking directly to the users of your service is always super valuable, and we came back with lots of useful feedback. The contextual stuff was important too, from seeing the posters on the walls, to the laptops (with tiny screens) they use our service on.
Design sprint
We’ve kicked off a ‘design sprint’ to look at the core part of our service with fresh eyes.
Our hypothesis is that we can make it much simpler and faster, but that to do so we need to start again with the design rather than tinker around the edges.
It’s early days, but we’ve started by listing out all our questions, writing down what we know and don’t know about why they’re needed, and then re-grouping and re-ordering the ones we’re confident on.
Next week is prototyping with paper and code.
Progressive enhancement
Last week the Central Digital and Data Office published an excellent update to Building a robust frontend using progressive enhancement which contains some much stronger guidance.
In particular, it gives some reasons why client side Javascript frameworks can introduce problems, and reasons why Javascript may fail to load or run.
It also says:
Do not build your service as a single-page application (SPA).
It’s not yet clear how this applies to NHS services, but we’ve had some good discussions about it.
Links
Links this week all revolve around the announcement of a new panel of technology experts to shape the government’s new ‘digital centre’:
- Working in the open – digital government in the U.K. in 2024 from Martha Lane Fox
- Ideas for the new ‘Digital Centre Design Panel’ from Jukesie
- A future vision for digital gov from Laura Yarrow
For what it’s worth, I shared my ideas for digital public works back in March.
Shout out to the 3 new people who joined digital prevention services this week!