Week 23: After the design sprint
On Monday this week we concluded up our design sprint with 3 testing sessions with NHS staff members working for vaccination units.
I always feel a bit nervous when observing user research, even after all these years. Rationally I know that whether the design works perfectly or not, you’ve learnt something valuable. But emotionally I’m invested in the design work and am hoping it doesn’t fail.
These testing sessions were a new experience for the team as we were testing low-fidelity wireframes built using Balsamiq.
The aim of the testing was less about the exact flow or question wording and more about the overall concept of setting up vaccination sessions in order to save time by not having to answer the same questions repeatedly.
Overall I think this was well received, and seemed to fit with existing workflow patterns. The one possible exception was the vaccination of on-duty NHS staff, which can happen in a more ad-hoc way.
We also got some useful feedback on the details too, and generally the participants didn’t get too distracted by the font and lack of colour.
The design sprint was wrapped up with an presentation of the work and a discussion of what next. We had some good engagement in this, not just from our team but wider and from senior leadership too.
At one point I estimated that we could save 30 seconds in the time taken to record a vaccination. I was concerned that this didn’t sound all that impressive and tried to emphasise the benefit when multiplied by hundreds of thousands of vaccinations. I needn’t have worried though, as everyone got it, and our Deputy Director suggested that even a 10 second saving was worth pursing.
Showing and telling
I had a brief slot in our vaccinations-wide show and tell to do a demo of 2 features we’re about to ship. When explaining the new features I tried to also give the context of why they weren’t in our initial launch, and the awkward workarounds we’ve had to give users in the meantime.
We got some good feedback on this, and hopefully it’ll encourage other teams to give more warts-and-all presentations. I suspect teams often feel they need to only tell super positive stories, but the day-to-day trade-offs and compromises are often much more interesting.
Service catalogues
One of the sessions in the extended senior leadership team last week resulted in a suggestion to find ways to give our service teams greater awareness of each other, to try and enable them to spot opportunities to share design patterns, learnings, or ways to join up.
Even within vaccinations there are lot of different services that are hard to keep up with, and there’s also all the screening services and other emerging prevention services too.
I let slip that I’ve helped maintain a list of GOV.UK services for the past 6 years, and so we’re now exploring whether it’d make sense to do something similar for the NHS.
Public roadmaps
I still have a lot of love for the teams and services back at the Department for Education, so I was delighted to see a public roadmap for the early career framework services.
The product manager Claire Hughes has written about how and why she’s done this in a great post on LinkedIn.
Here in the NHS there are some public roadmaps, including for the NHS APP and for NHS.UK but it’s not something our team has done yet.
Connecting people
I had some nice feedback this week that I’m a good ‘networker and people connector’.
I’ll take the compliment, but I’m sure there are still dozens of people I’ve not met yet who would be useful to get to know. Something to keep working on!
Links
- What we mean when we say “Be Bold” from Public Digital is great and suggests that the NHS could pivot to enable patients to continually monitoring some conditions remotely, rather than just digitising existing checkup services
- It’s OK for departments to have their own design system from Steve Messer continues the debate about design system management
Met some more new joiners in NHS digital prevention services this week! Hello to you all! 👋