Week 75: Zoning in
The Christmas season is upon us! ‘Change freezes’ are being referenced, and some issues are now being punted into next year.
I’m happy with how the week has gone, but I’ve developed a bit of habit of working late into the evening. I’m not complaining. It can be quite a peaceful time. Everyone else at home is in bed, there’s no Slack messages to distract, and I can zone in on some design and coding work. But I should probably avoid doing it too often.
Prototype kit training
On Monday we ran our final prototype kit training course of the year, up in Leeds. That brings the total up to 46 people who’ve completed the course now.
We’ve tweaked and improved some things along the way, but the course is pretty stable now, and we can turn up and run it with minimal prep.
I think we’ve also landed on a good balance between telling participants what to do versus giving them scope to make changes and add their own flair. This keeps people engaged and also makes the demos at the end more varied.
I hope people come away being impressed with themselves for having being able to build a 7 or 8 page prototype, including branching questions, from scratch within a day.
Once you know how, using the prototype kit can be a lot quicker than futzing about in Figma, as well as giving you a more realistic and interactive prototype that can be usability tested.
Next year we’ll continue running the course, with one session already scheduled in Newcastle in January.
Scaling for pharmacies
On Record a vaccination I’ve just finished a design iteration to try and make an incremental improvement for those managing pharmacies.
It’s an interesting design challenge, as pharmacies can vary from a single store, to a small independent chain of a few nearby pharmacies, to a mid-size regional chain, to the big national ones (including supermarkets).
Our service currently assumes each physical pharmacy is a separate organisation. The iteration I’ve designed would allow users to view and generate reports across all their pharmacies in one go, rather than having to do them individually and combine them.
It’s still not perfect, and the interface probably doesn’t scale to the very biggest pharmacy chains (they’ll end up with a very long page of checkboxes). But to fix that we’ll need to understand how the big chains group and organise their pharmacies for management and operational purposes - so that’ll be a question we take into user research.
Design systems for staff-facing services
Someone from another bit of NHS England asked for a chat this week about design in staff-facing services. The view from their teams was that the NHS design system was for services for the public, and there might need to be a new design system for services for staff.
This comes up a fair bit, and it’s an understandable assumption to make. The NHS design system was originally developed for the NHS website and public services, so it’s true that lots of the examples and patterns are geared to that.
But I don’t think we need a separate thing. Not all staff-facing services are the same. Some might genuinely need more complex interfaces optimised for speed and mastery rather than initial ease of use and error prevention. However others are used much more occasionally, by less experienced staff, alongside dozens of other services – and those might be more similar in style to public facing services. There’s a spectrum.
Instead of having multiple design systems, our strategy is to have a single one, containing different components and patterns for different contexts.
In the past year we’ve added a lot of new things to support staff-facing services, including a logged in header, smaller radios, smaller checkboxes, smaller buttons, numbered pagination, and more.
We’ve perhaps not done enough to shout about this though. Perhaps we need post about this on the official NHS blog?
Links
- In-year benefits and the 10 Year Plan for the NHS from Dan Bower, explains how organisations incentives can lead frustrate long-term outcomes.
- Goodbye, November from Veronika Jermolina has some great reflections on the work the digital breast screening team has been doing, getting out of the building and talking to users.
- ADHD Taskforce Part 2: A strong foundation, but who will deliver it? contains the team’s response to the report of NHS’s independent ADHS taskforce.
- Health and social care statistical outputs consultation: follow-up is an update on how the NHS/ONS/DHSC/UKHSA might publish health statistics in future. I’m all for a future of dashboards instead of PDFs, but let’s make sure that they are well-designed ones and not just a cacophony of PowerBI widgets.
Next week is the big DPSP winter event. I’ve not been involved in organising this one, so apart from one small slot when I’m helping to demo a service, I’ll be able to relax and enjoy it as an attendee.