Week 25: Away days
This week was half term so I took Monday off to take the kids to Legoland. But the rest of the work was busy with work.
Tuesday was a team away day in Leeds. The most interesting bit of the day for me was when most of the team visited the excellent accessibility lab set up there, and got to see our service being used with the screen-reader software JAWS. Many of the problems found were already on our backlog, but seeing the issues being demonstrated in person was hugely valuable.
We also had a good discussion about neurodiversity, the need for user interfaces to be predictable and consistent, and the benefits of one thing per page.
Wednesday was a wider away day in Leeds for the entire digital vaccinations unit. It was a good mix of talks and group discussions. We had 2 guests, from an NHS trust and an integrated care board, who talked about the day to day realities of delivering vaccination programmes and using our digital tools and services. Both were excellent and a great reminder of why we do what we do (and where we can improve).
There was also a ‘marshmallow challenge’ icebreaker after lunch which I was a little dubious about, but I put my cynicism aside and it was actually quite fun, even if we completely failed to even have a structure that stayed up. Reading about it after, it seems the main lesson of it is to not waste time deciding on an architectural plan and instead to dive straight in, experiment and prototype. I can get behind that.
Another part of the day was about celebrating successes, and I used the opportunity to distribute new mission patches for the RSV vaccine work. This was a huge effort across multiple teams, so I went shiny for it.
Workshoppin’
Back in London, on Thursday I was invited last minute to attend an all day workshop run by another team, who wanted to do some service design around possibilities for vaccinations within the NHS App.
I’m not sure I was super helpful. It was hard to marry up some of the ideas with the current technical and operational realities.
I have however learnt a lot more about the structure and information architecture of the NHS App, and some of the ways this might evolve in future.
NHS Prototype Kit
A side project over the past few months has been to improve the NHS Prototype Kit and its documentation, which has lagged behind its GOV.UK counterpart.
This week we soft-launched a new website for it, now on an official nhs.uk domain: prototype-kit.service-manual.nhs.uk.
As well as a new illustration (thanks Paul!), there’s a guide to switching from the GOV.UK prototype kit and an introductory tutorial inspired by the GOV.UK one (thanks Vicky for both!). I’ve also tweaked the installation guides and Ed has helped with reviews and fixes.
We’ll be testing it out with colleagues. If you have any feedback, let me know!
Links
- Are design systems too slow? by Rob McCarthy is super interesting and represents a possible gear change for the MOJ Design System crew – one to watch!
- Are policies like medicines? from James Plunkett is good. The short answer is no, but for the long answer you’ll have to read it.
- How Design System Day makes our community stronger from Imran Hussain is a nice write-up of the event I attended back in September, and how it fits into community-building.
This week also marked my final week of renting an office in a co-working building, something I’ve done since the pandemic. I’ll be commuting to the NHS office in Canary Wharf daily from next week. Times a changin’.