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Week 50: Pushing buttons

Frankie RobertoPosted on

Week 50. I was never sure I’d keep up weeknoting this long, but here I am. Should probably invest a bit more time in the visual design of this now.

Design system update

This week we pushed the button to deploy a button, releasing an update of the NHS Design system with a redesign of the secondary button.

Previously it was a dark grey, but there had been lots of research observing that some users perceive this as being inactive.

The new button addresses this by using an outlined style instead.

Screenshot of 2 buttons, one labelled Before and the other After. The first one has a dark grey background, the second has a blue border and a transparent background.

This redesign work actually dates back to 2022, initiated by Tosin and Nancy, and has been further developed by Dave in the NHS App, so it’s been a long time in gestation! There was a period where the design system had no team looking after it, and so issues such as this just languished in a backlog.

But better late than never.

I’ve played a small part in getting it over the line – sometimes I think my role is “polite nagging” – but the bulk of the work has been done by others, including Ananda, Sara and Colin. Big thanks to those and everyone else who’s contributed.

Colin has also done a ton of foundational work to update and improve the underlying code. This is less immediately visible but just as important as it’ll let us move faster in future.

Interesting

I wrote about going to Interesting last year, and this year was just as delightful.

As always, I enjoyed bumping into lots of people I know from the Internet circa 2010, although I didn’t manage to say hi to everyone.

This event was also one that Vicky used to to go. She was interested in everything, and I missed being able to discuss the talks with her.

The line up was as esoteric and engaging as ever. This year there was a great accidental theme of words and concepts from other languages. I loved learning about tegelwippen from Dutch (pavement gardens), higai ukemi in Japanese (the ‘suffering passive’ tense) and kombinować in Polish.

Kombinować, as explained to us, is the act of clever or hacky workarounds to bureaucratic barriers. I can identify with that.

Connections

I enjoyed a trip to Leeds to work with my team. It’s a long day with an early start, but every time I go I’m reminded of the value of face to face time. A couple of hours of discussing and whiteboarding some ideas together was more productive than a week of Teams calls and Slack messages.

We also had a great all-hands session, featuring a guest speaker discussing trans lived experience in healthcare, and an update from the bowel cancer screening team.

Planning a bike ride this weekend, as my 5 year old has recently learned to cycle. How far will we get? Let’s see.