Week 51: More seams than service
Mike wrote last week about the liminal spaces of service design, with ‘seams’ being a useful metaphor.
Anyone who’s interacted with the NHS soon realise that there are seams everywhere, sometimes smooth and sometimes full of painful friction. Being referred from one NHS organisation to another. Being sent from one ward of a hospital to another. Changing GPs.
Digital services are no different. It’s still common to receive an SMS from a GP which links to a webpage which links to a form which links to a login, all with different branding.
Even our national digital NHS platforms have some awkward seams.
If you visit NHS.uk and click ‘My account’ in the header and click through a few login screens, you’ll end up on a similar-looking website which now shows you as logged in. But if you then navigate back to the NHS homepage you started on, the header will look exactly as it did before, as if you’re not signed in at all.
Can users spot the seam of the transition between these 2 separate services on different subdomains (one is the website, one is the web version of the app)? Maybe, maybe not?
We have plenty of seams within vaccination digital services too. Some vaccinator staff might currently have to use several different systems to get their job done. Figuring out how to better join these together, where the seams are, and how visible they should be is a tricky problem.
X·GOVUK rebrand
X-GOVUK is an unofficial cross-government community I co-founded, where digital folk can collaborate on tools and projects that span government organisations but don’t otherwise have a home.
This week it got a small rebrand (thanks Paul!), taking a cue from the upcoming GOV.UK rebrand. Blue is the new black. Interpunct’s not dead.
Some of the community projects are ports of the GOV.UK design system for different frameworks (like Ruby, Eleventy and .NET Razor), so there’s been some work to get these ready for the GOV.UK rebrand, which should go live on 25 June.
Links
- The digital road to preventative care from Chris Fleming is a great summary of a recent discussion with NHS leaders and system providers
- A new era of system leadership from Mike Bracken at Public Digital is a fun counter-factual of the recent digital past
- NHS and local government to roll out world-first vaccine programme to prevent gonorrhoea from NHS England has some good news about a new vaccine programme
I’m on holiday next week. Have a good one.