Prototyping strategy
At the beginning of the year I built a ‘provocatype’ to demonstrate how we thought the user journey for personalised prevention could work. It served a few purposes. The most important was to provoke people to tell us where our plans wouldn’t work or would be difficult.
I think I built it in a couple of days, which probably means I built it in a couple of weeks. But it was built in a rush. It was very simple – a single, linear journey on the ‘happy path’.
It proved a valuable tool. We got a lot of useful feedback and one of our projects is a direct result of demoing it.
I intended to revisit it as we’ve learnt more about how this could actually work. The teams in Personalised Prevention Services have done the hard work to think about what this will actually look like. My understanding of the NHS has also improved.
Prototiming
With half of everyone away for August I found some time to start thinking about a new demo. I’ve only managed to sketch about 10 pages in Lucid so far. I’m using where the teams have got to as a starting point, but going a step further into the future.
I want to think about what needs to be true for us to start joining condition‑led use cases into a single journey. One that works across multiple conditions and supports the non‑linear way people experience looking after their health.
The purpose is similar to before but as we grow, we need more detail. We need to demonstrate to teams we’re working with, primarily the NHS app teams, what we’re planning so we can coordinate.
Trying to coordinate with the NHS app teams is one of the things I’m least confident about. We have routine conversations with the team, but the conversations are often theoretical. I worry that when it comes to reality we’ll realise we’ve been less in sync than we thought.
Design fiction
With this new version, I want to take the time to be collaborative and bring in more perspectives, instead of smashing something together. I’m spending time working at page‑level detail with a focus on content. Thinking about patterns and how they can handle the messy complexity we’ll need to manage. It’s fun to design and iterate. It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything at this level of detail.
The constraints are still ill‑defined. I’m making assumptions and papering over complexity. I don’t want to pretend we have solutions for everything, but we will need new ways of doing things before we can get to a coherent prevention service. Good design is about making things simple for users. But if the prototype just assumes a simple solution to a complex problem, it’s not helping anyone.
To avoid this, I try to track my assumptions and questions as I go. The purpose of the exercise is the conversations we have because of it. It needs to be detailed and authentic so that the thinking rings true and we can discuss the important complexities.
I’m looking forward to carrying on working on it and sharing with our teams.