Week 64: Hello world
The varying cadences of a few different meetings collided this week, so I ended up watching a lot of show-and-tells, each with slightly different audiences.
Working in an organisation as large as the NHS, you have to manage a constant balancing act between focusing on the thing you’re directly responsible for, whilst also having a wider awareness of other things that might impact it or present opportunities for connection and collaboration. In practice this means trying to guess which of the many meeting invites might be valuable to attend.
Two presentations which stood out to me this week were an update on the NHS App strategy, and a demo of a tool to assess the data quality of vaccination records from different sources.
Some of the other talks I found a bit harder to concentrate on, even though the topics were potentially relevant. I try not to let the presentation style (and length) affect my engagement level too much, but ultimately it ends up counting for a lot.
Prototype kit training
We ran our first full NHS Prototype kit training course (after last week’s trial run), and I think it was a success! All 5 pairs made a working prototype from scratch, and there was even enough time for them all to add their own customisation and extra pages, which made the demos at the end even more fun.
The course is aimed at complete beginners, so I spend a bit of time at the beginning introducing HTML and the origins of the Web. Then I ask participants to open Notepad (or another basic text editor), type out ‘hello world’, and experiment with adding tags and previewing it in a browser. This is where it all started, and I hope to channel some of that early wonder of the World Wide Web.
The rest of the course gets a bit more complicated, introducing JavaScript, Nunjucks and the NHS Prototype Kit, but I think we’re getting better at explaining it and pacing the exercises. We’ll keep tweaking it though.
Micol Artom attended it this week, and said some nice things about the course. She’s a researcher, but found it valuable to understand and appreciate the work in creating prototypes.
We deliberately didn’t restrict the course to just being for designers. As Tim says, this is for everyone.
Papercamp
I’ve been at Papercamp this weekend, which is described by organiser Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino as being somewhere between a conference and a village fete. About paper.
It was full of great talks from creative people, often about projects at the intersection of digital and analogue. Having paper, pens, scissors and glue on the tables also meant I could fiddle and doodle whilst listening.
It got me thinking a bit about the role of paper in the NHS. A lot of our projects aim to replace paper and letters with digital services and notifications. This will often be much more useful and usable, as well as save the NHS millions in printing and postage costs.
But maybe there are scenarios where paper is still the best technology, especially if we put more design effort into it? Hospitals are notoriously hard to navigate, and your phone is often not much help, so a printed map could help? Or when you get a vaccination, what if instead of being handed a folded leaflet of dense small print from the manufacturer, you were given a card which thanked you and which you could pass on to friends and family to encourage them to get theirs?
Print’s not dead.
Links
My only link to share this week is a long one: What does digital-era healthcare really mean? from James Plunkett. There’s a lot in it to digest and think about, and it mentions 2 of our vaccination digital services.
The key quote for me was:
We have to move away from functional silos and hierarchical governance to multifunctional teams. We need these teams to include not just digital and design, but also policy, clinical, and commissioning (or whatever is needed to work self-sufficiently).
Yep!
Nights are drawing in. Have started getting back into watching TV dramas. Send me your recommendations!