Week 85: 3 ways
If you’re a designer working on a service for the NHS, it’s unlikely that your service operates in complete isolation from everything else.
Instead, it’s likely hooked up to a bunch of other services to exchange data or deliver core functionality.
As a designer it’s tempting to treat the intricate details of how all this works as a purely engineering concern. But design is how it works, as Steve Jobs once said. And even if we can’t influence the design of all these integrations (and we should try to), it falls to design to make it clear to our users.
It’s in this context that I find myself reading and trying to understand the technical documentation for all the various systems and services within the NHS.
This is often made trickier by there being multiple different mechanisms to do the same thing, whether it’s reading and writing to GP records, searching for patients, getting information about organisations, single sign in systems, and more.
To give a quick generalisation, there might be 3 ways to do a thing:
- the old way, which is still being used but considered legacy and will be retired at some point
- the current way, which meant to be a replacement but has several known limitations
- the future way, which will supposedly fix all the issues but is not live yet
This isn’t just an NHS problem. I was chatting to someone who works at a gigantic tech company who was describing exactly the same thing there. It’s probably true of all large organisations.
I don’t know what the answer is. There’s often lots of good reasons to build a new thing rather than improve the current thing, whether it be technical, political or purely pragmatic.
And turning off the old thing is hard. Long transition periods can be sensible in a field as highly dispersed and mission-critical as the NHS.
But we have to try and trend towards making things simpler rather than ever more complicated. Particularly where that complexity spills out into complexity for our users – although NHS staff are now well used to different systems giving them slightly different data.
In the meantime, as designers we can help by trying to understand and describe the different ways to do a thing, both internally and for our users.
Links
- Newly published this week is some excellent guidance on writing NHS messages, and how to tailor messages for emails, text messages, app notifications or paper letters
- I wrote a short design history about updating the home page to support more vaccines in Record a vaccination
- Cohort to contact, are we all talking the same language? discusses the challenge of ambiguity in some of the terms we use within prevention, and offers an initial glossary
- Parents urged to protect children through vaccination on GOV.UK kicks off a new campaign, with measles outbreaks also sadly back in the news
I’m off to a colleague’s wedding this weekend. Let’s hope the suit jacket still fits!