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Week 36: Analysis

Frankie RobertoPosted on

Usability research on our new interface designs for recording a vaccination concluded this week. I watched a few sessions and was relieved that the new structure broadly works well.

Whilst we’ve reduced the number of questions asked and optimised for the most common answers, there are actually more screens in the new design, as we’re more closely following 1 thing per page, with some filter questions.

However the observed speed of task completion was high, and the error rate was low. The bonus feature of an even more optimised journey for giving a second vaccine to the same patient (known as co-administration) was especially appreciated.

Of course we also found lots of minor issues, and so spent some time as team analysing these and debating which ones could be fixed with an immediate change, which ones merited further exploration, and those that posed bigger questions which might have to be answered at a product or programme level.

Feature flags

One of our developers led a great session this week to discuss possible options for releasing our new interface.

Previously we’ve only released new features to all users at once, but with a change this big it might make sense to roll it out more slowly - even if we’re confident that it will ultimately be a big improvement for our users.

For services that people are using for work every day, any change can be disruptive and take some getting used to. We’d also want to be sure that the new interface is robust, and that we’ve not missed anything, even having done the research.

So the discussion soon turned to technicalities around how we could use ‘feature flags’, and the criteria we’d use to determine who gets the new feature and in what order.

Incremental roll-out could also let us measure the performance of the new interface against the old one in order to make sure it’s an improvement and quantify how.

This is all hypothetical for now as there’s still a lot to do before we get to this stage, but it was a promising conversation.

Work that spans teams

There’s also been lots of good conversations this month about initiatives that might cut across our existing service teams.

As in many organisations, these are really hard to achieve as teams all have their own priorities, and anything which has dependencies across teams requires a lot more co-ordination.

There’s a delicate balance to be found between giving teams the space to focus on delivery vs taking the time to have a broader view and collaborating to join things up.

I don’t have the answers, but there are some Slack channels set up, and others are giving this plenty of thought, so I’m hopeful.

Youngest was off school sick this week, so I had a day of working from home whilst trying to entertain him (most with TV and Lego). Lockdown flashbacks.