Week 41: The map is not the territory
This week I officially took on a new role as lead interaction designer across the vaccinations digital services. I’ll continue working 4 days a week with my team on Record a vaccination, but it means I’ll have 1 day a week working on cross-team projects and supporting other interaction designers.
It’s nice to be recognised in this way, and I’ve got lots of ideas for ways to try and make interaction design across our services easier, better and more consistent.
I’ll have to be super careful not to over-commit though, and instead to focus on the things we think will have the biggest impact.
Making users aware of product changes
We had some user research sessions this week where, amongst other things, we tested out some ideas we’ve been exploring to tell our users about new product features.
With our product being updated frequently, and those changes varying from minor tweaks to whole new features, there’s no one-size-fits-all pattern for this.
We’ve designed a range of options, from small ‘NEW’ labels in context to an interruption page on logging in, and some options in between. We’ve also considering a page listing recent changes, and how we could use other channels like email.
In the research we had users tell us that they like knowing about change, but also quite often ignoring the messages on screen about them.
So we’ll have to find a balance, and use different options for different levels of changes. A classic designer answer: it depends.
Services Week
The initial agenda for Services Week 2025 is out, and we at NHS digital prevention services are hosting 4 of them.
One of these is a conversation with Sarah and Ralph about service mapping, and when and how to move from mapping to doing. As Ralph reminds us in a sticker he’s designed (above), the map is not the territory.
Another of the session we’re running is an open show and tell.
Details of how to sign up to each session will be published soon.
Links
- My colleague Ralph has started weeknoting too! His first post, 5 months at NHS England is a great intro
- Article about attitudes to vaccinations in the Guardian
- Visualising modern digital government from the Government Digital Service
- Interview with Martha Lane Fox in the Guardian
- 2025/26 GP contract: what will it mean for England’s practices? from Pulse
The sun has arrived! Gonna be a glorious weekend.