Week 78: Reflections on 2025

Posted by: Frankie Roberto
Published: 31 December 2025

Happy New Year’s Eve! Here are some reflections on 2025.

Vaccinations

Being part of the national vaccination programme remains extremely motivating. Vaccinations save lives, and unlike some other health prevention efforts, have an almost immediate benefit.

Our mission is enviably simple: to increase vaccination rates up to the World Health Organization (WHO) targets.

Working on the digital products to support this, it can be hard to draw a direct causation line between our work and the intended outcome. But I’ve seen how important usability and ease of onboarding is for busy pharmacists (where vaccinations is only a small part of their business). It’s not hard to imagine that this can affect how many appointment slots they open up, or whether or not they even offer the vaccine in the first place. And we know that ease and availability of vaccinations is a key factor in uptake.

I had several chats with older folk over the Christmas period about their recent vaccination experience. Some complained to me about no longer being eligible for the COVID-19 jab (the age criteria has changed from 65+ to 75+). One told me about their initial appointment being cancelled as the pharmacy had run out of stock. But generally they were happy to have been able to boost their immune systems for the winter, against a backdrop of nervy news stories about busy hospitals. This is the real world impact of our work.

Product strategy

One of the enduring challenges we have at the NHS is that we have a lot of digital products, with more being launched each year, but they’re often not very joined up.

For staff working on vaccinations, there a separate services for getting training, managing appointments, advertising walk-in times, recording vaccinations, ordering stock, getting paid, reporting on uptake, and so on.

For the public there are different services for booking different vaccinations, or another service for finding pharmacies offering walk-in slots.

Over the next year I plan to spend some time with others thinking about and sketching ways to improve this. It might be that some services ought to be merged, or that other services remain separate but become more porous, with interface and data links to connect them. We might also look to align logins and account settings a bit more.

All of this is the realm of service design or product strategy, which in my view is a team sport born of pragmatism rather than something you can architect in isolation from reality.

Leadership

As a long time (12+ years) freelancer, I’ve never had to do ‘line management’, and words like ‘appraisal’ remain a bureaucratic mystery to me. The closest I’ve come has been doing some unofficial coaching.

At the NHS I now have a kinda split role. I’m both an interaction designer working on a single digital product (Record a vaccination) and a lead across the wider collection of vaccination digital services. At times this balance has been tricky, but on the whole I think it works ok.

In the past year I’ve been helping to build the design community within our bit of the NHS, organising things like design crits, community of practice get-togethers, prototype kit training. Alongside this is the less visible work of gently encouraging, supporting and sometimes cajoling others in private chats.

I’m grateful to be working alongside other more experienced leaders like Caroline, Micol, Mike and Ralph, whose thoughtful leadership styles I can seek to emulate.

Possibly I’ll at some point I’ll hit a career fork of having to choose between being a practitioner or a manager, but for the time being I’m enjoying being mostly in the first camp whilst learning more about the second.

Office spirit

I work from the office more than most. I tell people that this is because my flat is small and uncomfortable to work in, which is true.

However it’s also in a large part because I enjoy being around other human folk, which feels almost counter-cultural to say in a WFH dominated era.

Our little crew of regular office-goers has grown over the past year, and I’m grateful to them all for the corridor chats and lunchtime story-telling.

In numbers

In 2025:

NHS Frontend had 8 significant releases, a huge leap forward
46 people attended prototype kit training, across 5 sessions
I woke up early for 8 trains to Leeds
I wrote 47 weeknotes (including this one)
I visited 11 pharmacies and 2 hospital trusts for user research
I attended 6 events (5 internal, 1 external)
131 posts were published on the DPSP design history site, an incredible advert for working in the open
I’m in 103 Slack channels - deffo need to archive some of those

From others

More 2025 notes from our team:

I’m about to head off to the Netherlands for a few magical days in Efteling, where the forecast is currently predicting snow. See you in 2026!