I’ve been super impressed and engaged by the service design of the Our Future Health project (initiative?). Every interaction I have with it leaves me inspired and wanting to rave about it.

Finally then, here goes.

Best ever public sector service design?

From the first generic postal letter to URLs and web forms, to emails and text messages, to in-person appointments and after-care follow ups, it’s the most joined up service I’ve ever seen.

Enormous congratulations are due to the teams involved in this work. I would love to hear stories about how it came about and how they managed to create such smooth journeys.

In particular, it feels like there must have been some sort of overall User Experience Architect, or incredibly connected Lead Service Designer with access to every single touch point. Whoever you all are 👏👏👏

Seriously, you should try it

If you’re interested in seeing it all and participating in a great trial, sign up for yourself with this link they gave me, asking to encourage my friends and family to join in.

Outsider Service Assessment

I’m conscious that designers – interaction and service design types in particular – can be very critical when things don’t work, and services fail, or interactions are clunky and awkward (see the wonderfully cathartic grumpy.website for the best example of this).

But for a long while I’ve been thinking thatcwe need to be more constructive when we moan, and acknowledging of how challenging design environments can be. Or, at the very least, a bit more creative in the way we consider bad (and good) design.

Inspired by proper Service Assessments then, the idea of Outsider Service Assessments has been buzzing around in my head, and so to start with a positive, I thought I’d try the idea on Our Future Health.

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Interlude: Service Assessment explainer

A Service Assessment is like a check-up for digital products and services provided by the government. A bit like an MOT. They’re a way to make sure that services are working well and meeting the needs of the people who use them (as defined by well established User Centre Design standards).

They can be scary to go through for the teams involved in designing the service, but the intention is more about support and encouragement than point-scoring and punishment. Feedback is actionable and designed only to improve services for everyone involved.

By ‘Outsider’ Service Assessment I’m softly referencing Outsider Art (which I generally find more compelling that ‘insider’ art) and acknowledging that I’m not an authority in this area, and will be lacking many of the insights needed to give a full and fair assessment.

Outsider Service Assessments are just thoughts, basically. Trying to be more than a moan. Categorised observations and constructive feedback. That said, some of the other services I want to assess in this format may be hard to fully hold back on.

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Our Future Health

What is it?

The UK’s largest ever health research programme… an ambitious collaboration between the public, charity and private sectors to build the UK’s largest health research programme – bringing people together to develop new ways to prevent, detect and treat disease.

Our Future Health

Users and user needs

This is one of those fascinating scenarios where talking about ‘the’ user of the service isn’t really possible without considering multiple nestled parties and stakeholders.

Perhaps scientists (and the NHS) have the greatest user need here though, as they’re the group that needs the collected health data, and the only ones capable of turning all the effort into something of greater value.

Ultimately though, scientist are doing that work for the user needs of all people. Everyone and anyone that will benefit from the improvement of health services and shared medical knowledge/data.

Cynically, considering this is a collaboration between the public and private sector, you could also argue that a key ‘user’ is private companies, with their need for better data on consumers. For me though, this user group represents more of a risk and a facet of the public user need for their personally identifiable data to be protected.

In short, users of concern here need masses of good data, over a long period of time, to be easily collected, anonymised, and openly shared in order ‘to develop new ways to prevent, detect and treat disease.’

Does the service currently meet these needs effectively and efficiently? Very much so in my experience. Obviously, for aspirations of a larger data set over a longer time, the project needs to run for a lot longer yet, but given how well it is set up and how easy I found it to use and participate in, I can only imagine the team (and other users like me) are very pleased with progress so far.

Accessibility, design and usability

Perhaps the most impressive part of the whole service as I have already said, is how well it all stitches together. I can only imagine how positively this must have helped accessibility for all potential users. There are so few points that you might drop off and get confused.

By doing such a good job of lowering the friction between postal communications, online web forms, text message reminders, and real-world medical checkup appointments in portable clinics, this service is surely more accessible than anything else like it before.

The consistent tone of voice, content design, and brand design also work hard together and make the experience feel even more connected and trustworthy.

And from a web form perspective, this is a masterclass. So much information is required, so many steps have to be made, and so much consent needs to be understood, yet the journey through the forms makes it as easy as possible. It’s genuinely hard to imagine how you could ask so much in a more accessible or easy-to-use way.

Security and technology

From what I can see, security has been taken very seriously, and while I can’t see behind-the-scenes or ask questions about things like encryption and anonymisation strategy, it’s hard to imagine that a service would be this well designed on the surface and not be built on a brilliant and secure stack behind the scenes.

Taking a glance on LinkedIn at the technical team involved is also suggestive of how high the calibre is. Once again, I wonder if there’s a single technical architect across the entire service as it’s hard to imagine something so well-connected being built by separate technical team silos.

Performance

The speed which all my communications have taken place so far has been amazing. By the time I returned home from the mobile clinic, confirmation and next step emails were already waiting for me.

In fact, across my entire experience, the only slight wobbles I’ve seen have been due to locally poor cellular connectivity where my clinic was situated (in an area called the 5 valleys, so what would you expect!) and an interesting edge case issue with the clinicians web form not liking my low heart rate and assuming time and time again that it must be an error (it’s not, it’s just bradycardia which means a resting rate well below 60 bpm).

That said, even this issue was known by the clinician and explained clearly as something she was familiar with, and not for me to worry about.

Value for money

Again it’s impossible to say from outside what this is costing but assuming it’s running to its allotted budgets I would say that the value from a citizen perspective is enormous.

Opportunities for improvement

If not already apparent, my opinion of the service is quite high, and so it’s almost unimaginable to think how it could be improved much further.

Beyond updating the low heart rate input (allowing for an override that lets the clinician to make notes of things like bradycardia), and perhaps better logistics around Wi-Fi connectivity in poorly connected areas, the only imaginable ways of improving services like this is by user testing and continually taking more feedback.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall when that feedback comes in, and to witness how the team prioritises such marginal gain improvements. I’d be interested also to know about their plans for sustaining this service and keeping up with this level of quality. Teams change, new people come on board and have to catch up, and new ideas creep in over time.

For a project with such long-term aspirations, I can only assume they’ve given its roadmap many years of thought, and watching it unfold will be fascinating.

Again then, it you’re interested, sign up for yourself.

Is the positivity here a bit much?

I reflected a bit after writing this post. Read more here.