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Week 33: Cold start

First week back for me after a 2 week Christmas break. Weather was very cold (and the office too), with some frosty commutes. I needed several coffees to warm up and help jump start me back into work mode.

I’ve been continuing to work on a redesign of the core ‘record’ flow of our service, picking up from where we left it last year. Following a mammoth 3 hour collaboration call (which was productively working together making decisions and not a meeting) we’ve polished our prototype into a state where it can be user tested.

We’ve also got a list of decisions made, and how confident we are about each one. There’s still plenty of things we’re uncertain on, and so hopefully a combination of user research and internal clinical involvement will help us become clearer.

Meanwhile I’ve been doing a little bit of design work on patterns for when our users are on slow internet connections or hit unexpected errors. As our service is a single page app, we can’t rely on browser error handling, and so need to implement our own spinners, error messages and re-try processes.

We had a digital prevention services ‘all hands’ midweek, which had an unusually big in-person attendance. I enjoyed seeing a demo of a “provocatype” - a provocative prototype designed to illustrate a future vision rather than being part of an alpha for immediate user testing.


I’ll be at UKGovCamp next weekend. See you there.