We’re 5 or 6 weeks into a 4‑week discovery on how we could help publish results. The work we planned at the start is wrapped up.

The main thing we have left to understand is how we work with teams in alpha. That meant finding a tech lead for our team. We’ve got that person now and we can progress conversations with teams. We’re getting into the weeds of how we’ll work with teams next week.

During a discovery or any research, it’s interesting when what you’re learning tips over from being adjacent context to a part of your scope. It’s easy for me at least to over‑focus on the immediate problem and push the context to the side.

With a bit more breathing space in the work we’re doing, it’s possible to look at the whole problem. The most important thing we’ve seen as part of the discovery is how users are getting results that weren’t designed for them to receive, for example, exposed in their patient record or via documents shared with them. The experience can be harmful and distressing. It’s a tension for the team – is the boundary of the problem the boundary of what our team looks at?

This gets grouped in with the idea that no worrying results should be shown to the user without a healthcare professional to speak to. There are a few concerns that sometimes appear to be conflated:

  • waiting for a result – where ‘no news is good news’ is the most hostile version of this
  • not understanding a result – not knowing what the result means for a person’s health or what will happen next. This merges into the need for reassurance, that you’ll be cared for
  • need for empathy and understanding – to not feel alone with a result

The design for each problem is different. The context changes with the test and the result. I think we can provide systemic thresholds and allow for clinical discretion. My hope is that we can give people more results sooner, with less stress. The design for this needs to work for the whole journey and not rely on humans never making mistakes.

The absolute worst case for all of this is when it happens in a way that no one has designed. The software is working as intended, but the experience for users is created by the gaps between parts of the NHS.

Users getting unintended results is a problem that already exists in the NHS App. We want to set our scope around digital prevention services to start with and need to understand our role in improving the user experience across the whole NHS App.