Week 93: Drop it like it’s hot
This week I celebrate a blog post being dropped and share a discussion we had about ‘reuse’ at an away day.
One design system is better than 2
As previously trailed, this week my grid slot came up, and One design system is better than 2 was finally published on the NHS Design Matters blog.
This marks another milestone in our strategy to expand the scope of the NHS service manual and design system to cover staff-facing services – something I’ve covered a few times in these weeknotes, first back in week 22, and then in week 61 and week 75.
The aim of the blog post is to raise awareness of the work we’ve done so far, and to try and prevent teams from working on digital services for NHS staff from going off and doing their own thing.
Not only does this save time and prevent wasted effort, it also impacts the user experience too. Staff using lots of different digital services which use the same design patterns don’t have to spend as much time learning how to use interfaces.
As I try to make clear in the post though, this doesn’t mean that all services will be alike. There’s a huge spectrum, from services used infrequently to daily, and from those used by all staff to those used by a specialist handful. The design system is a common foundation not a finite set of parts which teams have to limit themselves to.
I’ve also observed a second order effect, which is that where staff use several different services which look very similar, but which are not joined-up in terms of the data, they are more likely to (rightly!) complain. This in turn can act as a bit of a forcing function encouraging us to improve our data flows.
Reuse
On Monday I went to the extended leadership team (ESLT) away day for digital prevention services.
One the planned discussions was about ‘reuse’. This wasn’t well defined so meant different things to different people.
My reaction when people mention reuse is to talk about micro things like the design system (see above), frontend libraries and common style guides. There is informal reusing too – designers are magpies, and are constantly copying and tweaking ideas from other people.
But much of the discussion was about the higher-level reusing of platforms and API services - thinks like NHS Notify, Cohorting as a service, Care Identity Service and so on. The NHS has lot of these, in different stages of development.
The result of our discussion was to list 3, perhaps-controversial ideas:
- Rethink mandates - make products and platforms that are so good that teams want to use them, rather than trying to force them to.
- Teams should work in the open and promote their services through design histories, show and tells (with no slides, show the thing only!), great documentation and so on.
- We should identify opportunities for reuse as they emerge, rather than try and architect it all up front. This is more art than science!
Links
- Supporting MenB vaccinations in response to an outbreak – I wrote about the design changes we made to add support for the MenB vaccine
- Improving the booking retrieval process - Jo Lumley documents some great changes that the vaccination booking services have made
- Mapping childhood vaccination data flows - a great post from an alpha team which describes the Bermuda Triangle of childhood vaccination data
- Newborn blood spot notifications - a summary from another alpha team, looking at how parents are told the results of the newborn blood spot test
Heading out for a long family bike ride this weekend. London is great in the sun.