Week 15
- A long pause since my last weeknote as we’ve been in bunker mode essentially writing and designing our end-to-end user journeys for our new service.
- Me and Jen have probably had the most stressful, but productive few weeks where we’ve had to drop all other work to get this project over the line. Lots and lots of thoughts about why we got into this position, and what it means — but it’s a great feeling to feel like you’ve managed to turn something around and hopefully deliver something great for users.
- There have been a lot of design and content decisions made in the past 2 weeks and so I’ve spent the whole day today documenting those design decisions.
- I’m off to the Lake District tomorrow for a well-earned break — and I’m conscious (and hopeful) my brain will switch off entirely. I want to document every little decision and conversation about every little detail — because context and thinking is important on big messy projects. In 1 week, 1 month, 1 years time I want to be able to remember why we did (or didn’t) do something. Institutional memory is bloody important.
- One example… we’ve thought a lot about adding friction into the user journey of someone making an advance decision to refuse treatment. Thinking about the process of someone making an important decision about medical treatment, there are points in this journey where we may want to slow a user down in an online service.
- We’re using this design pattern in the NHS service manual community backlog . The pattern is — Stop users in a journey to tell them important information, and whilst it’s not a published pattern it is in use by several services in the NHS.
- Our design hypothesis is that by adding an interruption screen we can better explain / inform users when their decisions will apply. This addresses some concerns in user research that some people weren’t quite understanding the implications of a refusal of treatment and when that would apply. We think this could help:
- Reflecting on the past few weeks, I am convinced now that institutional memory is absolutely vital to designing good services. There are inherent risks to working with anyone external and I’ve talked before about ‘being experts’ but I have been struck by how much it’s been an issue for us in this piece of work.
- Something to mull whilst up on the fells…
