Doing work in a big org sometimes feels like trying to leave the house with a toddler. If you could stack the tasks back to back, the whole thing would take 15 minutes. But instead you need to carefully coordinate each thing individually. Give 5 minute warnings, distract, play, indulge, not lose your shit when they refuse to wear a coat even though it’s raining. They can sense when you’re stressed and so remaining calm is vital.
We didn’t get to speak to all the teams that are involved in our first experiment so I can’t talk about the detail yet. It’s a bit frustrating that we couldn’t make calendars line up.
We did speak to a few people and with each conversation we’ve honed the idea and our approach, it’s starting to feel concrete. I can see how the work will support and build on other work in Digital prevention services. There’s a core idea the work is built on that we need to test, but as long as that assumption holds true then I think we’ve got something that will add value, designed around user needs and built for what helps the system meet those needs.
If we can get agreement on the idea across Digital prevention services, I think the next thing will be to start a more formal discovery, it can be lightweight, but needs rigour that we’ve not applied yet. Testing assumptions about data and putting prototypes in front of users.
A theme that has come up a couple of times since we started on Managing my Health is what belongs in the NHS app. To me, the rule is only put things in the app that earn the overhead of authenticating – the app is a secure environment so we can show people sensitive information, don’t show them things they could find on the web more easily. So for example, not showing people a list of things 65‑year‑olds are eligible for, but showing the user what they are eligible for. This is harder than I’d assumed though – we can’t always be as confident as we need to be to infer eligibility. Part of the discovery will be understanding what data we actually have access to and how reliable it is and what we can do to have the certainty we need to create a journey that works for users.