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Week 98: Three big shifts (for me)

Posted by
Frankie Roberto
Published

After wrapping up with RAVS and then having a family half term holiday, this week I started in my new team.

The new team is still part of NHS Digital prevention services, and includes Ralph, Rose, Steve, Jamie, Jeannie and Alistair – a great bunch!

The team has been created because the NHS App is changing, from digital front door to lifelong companion, and our role is to help shape and support prevention services in that future.

This is very different from my previous team.

It means I’m facing 3 big shifts:

Web → App
Staff facing → Public facing
Live service → Early stage design

Web → App

I know the web. I’ve been working with it since the 90s, when it was new and exciting. I understand how it works, its quirks, conventions and history.

Mobile apps are different. I still remember the first iPhones pre-App Store where you’d just use web apps, but that idea didn’t last and native apps soon became a thing that exploded in popularity and are now ubiquitous.

I’ve used mobile apps, of course, but I’ve not really spent much time designing for them, and especially not in the past 10 years.

The current NHS App is mostly web views embedded in a thin app wrapper,but the plan is for it to become much more of a proper platform-native app.

This means new design conventions, new coding languages, new ways of working.

The web is still my first true love, but I’m excited to learn and get stuck in to designing for the NHS App.

Staff facing → public facing

Lots of gov design is designing for services for staff, whether those be civil servants or teachers or doctors and nurses. It’s what I’ve probably spent most of my time doing.

There are government services used by huge propositions of the general public, like GOV.UK or applying for common things like driving licenses or passports, but those services tend to be the minority.

The NHS App though is truly used by vast numbers of people, and the ambition is for it to be used by almost everyone. This is particularly true when you think of prevention services as being used by people when they are well and not just those who are ill or have a condition.

But unlike staff services which might be used by a small group of users for hours at a time, the NHS App is for most people to use but for short amounts of time.

This means quite a different way of doing design and research.

Live service → early stage design

Working on a live service has its challenges but it is great being able to get insight from how your services are actually up the service and then design changes and see them ship, and hopefully deliver real user value.

Whilst the NHS App is a live service, the project to make it more native has only just begun. And although there are a few prevention related things in the app already, the ideas about what prevention in the app could be are at early stages.

The team is just concluding an initial discovery focused on one possible initial starting point, but there is a lot that is still unknown and uncertain.

In recent years I’ve become far more comfortable and familiar with designing for a fairly well defined service proposition than on helping to sketch out and explore possibilities for a loosely held idea.

But I did used to do a lot more of this, including a long stint with BBC R&D where nothing ever went beyond a prototype, so I’m hoping those skills and instincts are still there somewhere.

(Although I hope that we go beyond sketches and alphas, and can test and learn through getting things live.)

As always, I’ll be working in the open and writing these weeknotes to share the journey with you.