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Week 49: Multiple front doors

Frankie RobertoPosted on

Another 4 day week with a lot crammed into it.

Ann, the content designer in our team, and I had earmarked one of the days for in-person collaboration. We added an event in our Outlook calendars titled “Get stuff done” and rejected any other meeting requests. It largely worked, and we made some good progress.

I really love the process of huddling around a laptop, trying out words and ideas without being precious, continually tweaking and changing them until we reach a consensus of it being good enough to test. More of that.

We’ve also been doing a bit of organisational archaeology to try and work out what the rules and policy for a particular process is. We’ve spoken to various teams but there’s no definitive answer so far. In the meantime we’ve been designing various possible options and asking ‘is it this?’.

Sometimes this can be frustrating for designers, and it sure would be easier to have a complete set of ‘business requirements’ up front. But that’s rarely the way, and the power of an initial design is often to provoke a conversation.

Single front doors

I’ve now met several teams across the NHS who are working on a thing they’ve called a ‘single front door’. These have largely been unconnected projects which don’t directly overlap with each of other, but the prevalence of the phrase makes me uneasy.

The term is usually more of an aspiration than reality. (See also: single source of truth, single sign in, single patient record.)

But should it even be a goal?

It’s an understandable instinct. Do any research in any moderately complex field and you’ll find users frustrated with having to navigate a bewildering array of different services, platforms, and sources of information. Think of TV shows, kids activities, public transport or finding a tradesperson.

Wouldn’t it be easier if they were all in one place?

Sure - but it’s not any easy task. You’ll need some combination of policy levers, economic muscle, great marketing, persistence, and a fair sprinkling of luck.

And even then you’ll not be the only one.

Many a portal, platform or listings site has failed – I’ve worked on several.

For something as broad as healthcare, chasing a single front door may turn out to be a fools’ errand. There definitely needs to be a lot more integration, consolidation and simplification. The NHS should be more of an actual national service rather than a disconnected set of parts, at least digitally.

But healthcare rarely follows a single path. It’s complicated and interconnected. You may find yourself needing or wanting treatment or preventative care at any point, with a huge number of possible prompts.

So perhaps we need to accept the realities of multiple front doors, and design porous services that can be discovered when and where you need them.

NHS prototype kit update

I pressed the button to release an update to the NHS Prototype kit this week.

It’s a relatively small update.

One foundational change is that we’ve recently included a page template with NHS frontend, and so the prototype kit now uses that instead of defining its own. This makes future updates easier.

I’ve also added a ‘Reset data’ feature to the prototype kit, which is helpful when doing design, and can also be used by participants at the end of a usability research session to help reassure them that any data they’ve entered is not retained.

It’s a feature that the GOV.UK Prototype kit has had for years, so I largely just copied that, but I was about to make a small improvement: once you’ve reset the data it’ll take you back to the page you were previously on.

Enjoy the sunny weekend!