Week 67: Just functional enough
A short week for me, as I’m going away Thursday to Monday for a mini trip with my brother.
This week I’ve been mainly getting 2 new features in our prototype into a more realistic working state, for demo purposes and so they can be tested in task-based usability research. Both features involve manipulating lists of data, so I added some setup helpers which generate random names, NHS numbers, and so on.
It’s still a long way from being fully functional, but I think it’s good enough for now. There’s always a risk with making prototypes that you put too much effort in, and the code ends up being just as complicated as an actual production service.
At some point I’d like to write more about designing services which involve lots of data, as that’s a large chunk of what government does. Think case workers, admin systems, patient management, appointment systems, and so on. These design patterns aren’t nearly as well documented as the traditional public-facing transactional service.
Prototype kit training
Following our successful previous 2 sessions of our new beginner training course for the NHS Prototype kit, we’ve now scheduled some more sessions and sent out a sign up form. Demand has been strong, and we’ve got over 50 people requesting a place already.
We’re also improving the free online support, for those who can’t attend the in-person training or prefer to learn at their own pace. This week I wrote a quick new guide to using filters, which are a helpful little feature of the Nunjucks template language, but aren’t the easiest to discover.
COVID-19 confusion
There’s been some confusion this week with the COVID-19 vaccination, as the age based eligibility has changed, following JCVI advice, from 65 years and over to 75 years and over.
As has been reported in the news, pharmacies have had angry patients turning up unaware that they are no longer eligible.
It’s a tricky issue, and colleagues have been working hard to get some extra communications out to explain the changes.
Links
- New NHS online hospital to give patients more control over their care from NHS England, following the announcement during the Labour Party conference. I don’t quite understanding the framing of it, but enabling more remote appointments where it makes sense to do so seems like a good thing.
- Can you apply service design principles to fix a fragmented NHS? from colleague Liz Lutgendorff is a thoughtful response to the graphic novel ‘This Might Surprise You’ by Hayley Gullen.
- What we learnt about how pharmacies approach vaccination bookings is a summary of some research that our Manage your appointments team have done which really shows the value of doing in-person research.
Off to try and visit as many European countries as we can in 5 days.