This week I took part in a 2 day hack day with some other teams in the London office. Our team was invited as we’ve been exploring test results , particularly for the screening services. The question to explore was ‘how might we help users find and understand results from multiple sources in the NHS App?’ The problem, as introduced by James is that currently if you open the ‘Test results’ section…
Last week of term (for my kids at least), and summer holidays are fast approaching. Communicating the discovery A lot of my team’s time this week was spent communicating what we’ve learnt so far to other teams, in various forms. I don’t need to summarise it here, as Ralph and Jeannie have written a design history post: Helping users do more with their results , so you can go read that instead.…
It’s been another very hot week. And as the weekend approached, my son came down with the traditional end-of-summer-term vomiting bug. He’s fine now, but we all lost a lot of sleep. Consequently these notes are going to be quite short. Good Services, Bad Services I did find some time on Sunday afternoon to sit outside and read Lou Downe’s new book, Bad Services . I enjoyed it. Especially chapter…
My new team did a kick-off this week, marking the start of an alpha phase of the work. We’ll continue learning things – discovery is never done – but now we’ll start designing and testing different ideas, in collaboration with other teams, as well as investigating the technical options in more detail. Our kick-off was held in person. We had sessions on our existing research, our goals for the…
This is not normal. It’s been a week of heat . Too hot to sleep. Too hot to cook. Too hot for the office air con to work. Too hot to think. The couple days of anxious waiting to see if schools would close brought back painful flashbacks of the start of the Covid 19 pandemic. And then when many of them closed — partially or fully — the parents in our teams were once again back to juggling childcare…
It’s Father’s Day and I’ve been to see Toy Story 5 with my kids. The first film came out when I was 11. The new film’s central conceit is ‘tech vs toys’, and it’s meaningful without being overplayed. I would make a comparison to ‘tech vs doctors’ in the NHS, but I don’t want to include any spoilers so let’s leave it there. Messages vs data I’m now a couple of weeks in to working with my new team ,…
This week’s weeknotes are a little personal. I hope you forgive the oversharing. For several years my hearing had been getting slowly worse. Not so bad that I couldn’t hear at all, but enough that I would miss things if people weren’t speaking directly to me, and wouldn’t wake up when my kids made a noise in the middle of the night. Worse in one ear than the other. Worse whenever I got a cold. And…
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…
I’ve just finished a 2 year stint week working on the Record a vaccination service (RAVS) . I joined the team back in April 2024. The aim was to replace a pandemic-era legacy service called the National Immunisation & Vaccination System (NIVS), but to design and build it in such a way that it could be more easily extended to other vaccine types, beyond COVID-19 and flu. At the point I joined, a…
Lots of, er, political distractions this week. But I mostly managed to focus on finishing up a whole bunch of design-related coding tasks which are too tedious to report here. So let’s talk about some other topics instead. Small (not so) boring tools made with AI In our monthly user-centred design community call this week, we had Joe Julier leading a mini show-and-tell of small tools that he and…
Another 4 day week. Had to be reminded of this by a colleague when I tried to book in a meeting for the Monday. Spent the day taking the kids to the cinema instead. Thing mapping At our in-person team get-together this week, I organised a group activity to try and map out the things in our service. The idea was to use index cards to name the nouns and string to show the relationships between them,…
This week started with a 5:30am alarm for an early train to Leeds, where I ran another session of the NHS prototype kit training course . It was our 8th time running it, and I no longer need to do any prep (other than remembering some print-outs), but it’s a long and tiring day. Totally worth it though, to see the excitement when participants realise that they can actually make things that…
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…
After a couple of weeks of perhaps overwrought weeknotes, this week I return to the traditional format of wot-I-did-this-week. As part of my leadership role I try to encourage designers to work in the open and share their work in progress. This can understandably take people a while to get comfortable with. So in this spirit, I’ll share 3 bits of interface design I’ve been working on, each of…
My win of the week was getting a blog post approved for publication on the NHS Digital Design Matters blog. Getting an official blog post out is a lengthy process with several steps and sign-off needed from multiple teams. The post was initially rejected, but approved after I appealed for more feedback. I’m not entirely sure why, I wasn’t in the room where it happened. I’ll say more about the post…
I went to see Hail Mary on Monday at the cinema. It’s a space film about an against-the-odds quest to save humanity, based on a book by the same author as The Martian. I enjoyed it. You should go see it if you like that sort of thing. Sometimes working in digital for the NHS feels like a Hail Mary activity. Trying to fix an organisation saddled with decades of technical debt and unfathomable…
This week the sun finally returned, and I could stash away the winter coat. Even managed an after-work drink stood outside watching the sun go down. Prototyping with real data I spent much of the week preparing for some user research that took place on Thursday. We’ve been looking again at how pharmacies sign up to Record a vaccination. The design we launched in August last year has been…
A short week for me, as I returned on Wednesday from my skiing weekend (which was great), so I’ll keep these brief too. Spring We’ve been getting ready for the start of the Spring 2026 Covid vaccination campaign. As with the winter campaign, this is for those over 75 years old, resident in a care home or immunosuppressed (see JVCI guidance ). For the staff using Record a vaccination (RAVS), we’ll…
Over the past week I’ve been involved in a workshop and some conversations about the design process. Whilst most of our teams within NHS England are now using the NHS prototype kit , some teams are also using Figma to document every variant of every screen. I can see how it can be useful to be able to visualise the flow of a service, but I fear that expecting designers to maintain both a coded…
This week I got a stark reminder of the importance of vaccinations, in the form of a text message from my kids’ school about increasing measles cases in North London. The message linked to a PDF of a letter from our local Integrated Care Board (ICB) which tell us to: Learn about the signs and symptoms of measles Check if our children (and us) have had the MMR vaccination Arrange MMR vaccination if…