Service design is usually left‑to‑right. Service maps are almost always drawn this way. But there’s a top‑to‑bottom axis too, from far‑reaching and vague to incremental and detailed. This week I worked at the detailed end – how the Managing My Health (MMH) team might change a label in the app, from ‘Hum papill vir DNA dtctn assay’ to something like ‘HPV test’. And at the vague end – what the NHS would look like if the technology were designed around users and staff.
And some stuff in the middle. Helping shape what a coherent prevention experience needs in the NHS App, and finding a way to bring local health into what we offer nationally. Holding a thread between these bits feels less like design and more like being a repository. Moving context between layers.
Frankie wrote about the work MMH are doing to make concrete fixes – whether to patch the HPV label, or fix the root cause. I’m pro doing the patch too. It’ll teach us about shipping a change to the app. Part of our job is to support other teams working with the NHS App, and that’s harder to do if we’ve never done it ourselves.
It’s a small change, but it’s a fix outside any one team’s scope. A label that belongs to nobody falls through the gaps. That’s what MMH can pick up. The change is a precursor to more fundamental work on how results build out to become connected journeys.
Mike wrote about the far‑reaching work we’ve been doing. Coordination doesn’t just happen – someone has to decide what matters most and live with having chosen. That’s a better way of thinking about myself than as a repository. My role is choosing what’s worth carrying between the layers.
Part of transforming prevention has to be giving local health more control of what the user sees, from the start of the experience. National reach, with local knowledge of who to speak to and how, connecting people to prevention services that exist near them. This is the conclusion we reach in the vision work – we can’t do this from the centre, and shouldn’t try to.