Week 77: Design History Day
Writing design histories are a core part of our practice in NHS digital prevention services.
In our regular welcome calls for new starters, I have a slot to introduce what they are and how to contribute.
I’ve honed my spiel down to offering 3 motivations for them, in order of importance:
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for your future self, your team and anyone who succeeds you: to remember what you did, the design intent, what you learnt, and anything you’d like to have but which got deprioritised.
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so that other related teams within NHS prevention services can understand what you’re doing, learn from you and spot opportunities for connection.
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to communicate more widely with stakeholders across the healthcare system, and for public transparency.
See also: Why we write design histories.
However, it can be hard to get around to actually doing them. So I had a last minute idea last week to declare the last Friday before the Christmas break as Design History Day, when we could support each other to publish as many as possible.
It was a success! We did 13. A huge well done to everyone who took part.
I have now read them all, and I’d invite you to at least read some of them too. To whet your appetite, here’s brief bit about them each.
Vaccinations
What we learnt from visiting London pharmacies – this was the one that I wrote, although it was mostly a summary from a research playback that our researcher Mark Harnett presented. Whilst we had lots of positive feedback, we learnt about plenty of issues too.
Our first customer experience survey – in this, Anna documents the satisfaction survey we sent for the first time to all 16,500 users of Record a vaccination. Read the post to find out our scores and what we plan to do next with the results.
What we learnt from our first seasonal vaccination campaign – the new Manage your appointments service offer reflections from their first winter campaign. Stand-out quote for me is: ‘for staff working in the NHS, double entry is a fact of life, so much so users do not often bring it up unless prompted.’
Reaching our under-represented users – this post from the Book a vaccination service reports on findings from pop-up user research sessions in libraries. This led directly to a changes in the service, including swapping the terms ‘AM’ and ‘PM’ for ‘morning’ and ‘afternoon’.
Responding to insights – another one from the Book a vaccination team, this time showing how they’ve responded to analytics data and user feedback. One bit that stood out to me was helping users who try to use the service but can’t because they are registered to a GP in Scotland or Wales.
Screening
Understanding how participants are selected for breast screening – this is an amazingly accessible summary of what is currently an incredibly complicated process. Read it to learn about the difference in approach between 2 subtly different ‘batching’ processes.
Using design sprints to help us learn quickly – how a design sprint helped the Breast screening reporting to rapidly research, design and iterate a prototype dashboard to replace an existing report that is ‘not used regularly’.
Running a film reading design sprint – hot on the heels of the previous design sprint, this post sets out how they plan to run their next one, this time focused on a report which supports the assurance process of radiologists who read mammograms.
When logins become dead ends, and how to avoid them – an honest look at the problems of staff authentication (‘If they have to log in, we’ve lost them’), and some diagrams showing future improvements.
Checking information collected during an appointment – the Manage breast screening team show how they’ve iterated on the classic ‘Check your answers’ pattern to give staff a more succinct summary of the patient information they’ve entered.
Recording what images have been taken – another from the Manage breast screening team, this one showing a screenshot from the current Visual Basic application, and how they’re planning to reduce the amount of information that needs to be manually entered in the new service. Also contains a design for a new ‘stepper’ component which may helpful elsewhere.
User research findings from digital-first breast screening invitations – this team’s work has now been paused, and so this post summarises what the team have learnt, as a helpful guide to whichever team picks up this work again in future.
Personalised prevention
Improving uptake – the NHS Health Check Online team show how they’re updating the service to try and reduce drop-off rates. One example: ‘the tone of the final reminder initially felt too threatening and was softened based on feedback’.
This weekend I’m taking the kids to see the legend that is Michael Rosen, telling stories and poems at the Old Vic. And then we’re off to North Wales for Christmas.