Week 46: Product comms
A 4 day week after being away for a holiday last week. By Tuesday my brain was already a bit frazzled from trying to catch up with all the different things happening at once.
Pharmacy IT
Our new researcher Mark has been leading some research with pharmacies who do not (yet) use our NHS Record a vaccination service. We want to understand whether they’ve heard of us, what they currently use, and how they go about selecting software platforms to use.
This is interesting to us as, since 1 April, they now have more independent choice over what to use for recording NHS vaccinations. Previously this was largely determined by the NHS regional teams.
We’re yet to fully analyse the research sessions, but it’s quickly become clear that the switching cost, in terms of general admin faff and having to get staff used to a new system, is high. So the benefits need to be compelling.
The pharmacies also clearly articulated the need for either a single system which does all of what they need, or failing that, greater integration between systems if they have to be separate. Neither of these things are the status quo.
Product pages
Related to the above, I’ve been looking at how and where we should have web pages which describe the various NHS digital vaccination products. These will increasingly be a need to ‘sell’ our services to organisations which have a choice, as well as do things like signposting where to get support and how to sign up.
Chatting with Richard Pope over lunch, he described how the need for this become apparent to the Government Digital Service when they started their platform services - and now Notify, Pay, WiFi, One Login and Forms now all have good product pages.
The best example I can find within the NHS is NHS Notify, which includes benefits, briefly describes how it works, and lists the prices for text messaging and email.
I’ve already used a similar template for the NHS Prototype kit, and it could soon be time to have these for our digital prevention services too.
Designing and writing the pages is one thing though, actually getting our audience to them is a whole other comms question.
It’s not super common for public sector digital services to need to do much marketing. Often our users have no choice but to use our services. But it’s not completely unheard of either. If you know of any good examples or case studies, let me know.
Links
- 4-week delivery model — one year (and a bit) on from Kelly Lee is a nice summary of how the GOV.UK Design System team have gotten on since switching from 2 week sprints
- How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner by Annie is a great spoof demonstrating how badly written technical documentation can be.
- Touched a nerve from Paul Lloyd is a summary of the response to his Bored of it poem about you-know-what.
Happy bank holiday weekend!