Week 74: Satisfaction
I was off ill on Monday, so the rest of this week felt like I was playing catch up, whilst still not feeling 100%.
Notes in brief:
- We sent out a survey to all the users of NHS Record a vaccination and within a couple of days had over 1,000 responses. This is something we’d be talking about doing for yonks, so it was great to finally press send. We’ve not analysed the responses yet, but the headline figure is a satisfaction score of about 90%. This is a great vanity metric, but mainly it serves as a baseline so that we can see if the score improves or drops in future surveys.
- The NHS declares this week the Big Week of Vaccinations in London for the flu jab, with outreach events at football stadiums, shopping centres, soft plays and more. These campaigns and digital communications are run by a different bit of NHS England from vaccination digital services (VDS), with the 5 different integrated care boards (ICBs) involved too, which is why you’ll see the location lists scattered across multiple different websites. But if the aim is to reach people not actively searching for a vaccine, then perhaps it’s more about foot traffic than online traffic.
- Mike wrote last week about user-centred design and patient safety, and by coincidence we had a good discussion this week about clinical risks when recording vaccinations. One interesting aspect is there can often be a risk in not doing something as well as doing it. Clinicians face real-life trolley problems all the time, and have to make these calls. With vaccinations, it’s often not possible to show a patient’s full vaccination history, for a variety of reasons, and the patient may not remember either. Our clinical safety person pointed out though that with vaccinations the risk of additional side effects from being vaccinated twice is often much lower than the risks from not being vaccinated at all.
- I’ve now updated to iOS 26 and it’s taking me a while to get used to the ‘liquid glass’ – is that a water droplet on my screen or is it a button? The GOVUK design system team are currently discussing making their buttons rounded, and we’ve had a half-joking debate about whether the NHS should respond by going even more rounded? It’s a bit of a cliché for interaction designers to endlessly tweak buttons, but they can end up being a signature visual element in a brand, as well as needing to be as usable and accessible as possible. My only real contribution is to suggest that sharp edges on physical things can be painful, which perhaps explains why we associate rounded corners with child-friendliness?
Links
- Why use React? from Jeremy Keith explains the downsides of using React in the browser. This is still often the default for many NHS services despite guidance to the contrary, but things are changing (I hope).
- The Digital prevention services website now has a page about our vaccinations digital services. We’ll continue updating this to tell our stakeholders what we’re working on, working in the open as much as possible.
- A consultation on draft prostate cancer screening recommendation opened this week, following a recommendation to not recommend population screening. This got a lot of news, as some public figures like Chris Hoy have been advocating for more widespread screening. It’s a tricky, controversial topic, as screening carries risks of over-diagnosis.
- I’ve been doing some more small experiments using AI for boring coding tasks, by assigning some tasks to Copilot in GitHub. The thing I like about this is that it’s far more transparent, and I’m not invisibly passing off AI code as my own.
- Getting ready for the Autumn-winter 2025-26 campaign is a design history entry from the Book a vaccination team detailing some of the changes they’ve made for this winter.
Weekend plans include seeing Zootopia 2 and going to a Christmas market. The season has begun.