Every 6 months since I joined NHS Digital in June 2017, I’ve written an update on our progress building digital capability inside the NHS. It’s a helpful discipline for me to look back and see how far we’ve come, and to remind myself what more we have to do. Ending my 2.5 year note in … Continue reading 3 years into my work at NHS Digital – part 1: this is transformation
The year is 2000. I am a product manager. I’ve worked with designers and a usability specialist to specify a new feature for a consumer news service for a major telecoms operator. But what comes back from engineering is unrecognisable. It doesn't work as we specified. Worse than that, the engineers have added all sorts … Continue reading Delivering digital service: this much I have learned
I was on a panel at the Digital Urgent & Emergency Care Conference, brilliantly chaired by Emma Mulqueeny. I wrote these notes as prompts for my contribution. Not everything here came up in the discussion but I thought the notes worth sharing anyway... The NHS Long Term Plan reflects society’s expectations of technology in all … Continue reading Challenges and changes – some notes for a panel session on delivering services
In 2015, Tom Loosemore asked if anyone had written a blog post about how “most of government is mostly service design most of the time”. I couldn’t find one, so I wrote it myself. Thanks in large part to a link from the awesome UK government design principles, that post has been viewed more than … Continue reading Mostly service design: the health and care edition
A couple of conversations recently made me realise I should write this down. Jane tweeted: "Public Sector Digital peeps, what is now the best definition of a ‘Service’ for people not used to working in our world? The end-to-end journey which enables a user to ‘do a thing’ - am sure many have put it … Continue reading What I mean when I talk about service
I was honoured to be invited to talk at Health Product People at the Department of Health and Social Care this week, especially so because I was on the same bill as Hadley, Ian and Kassandra, all of whom were brilliant. I loosely titled my talk “Stop disempowering people.” (Thanks to Ian for photo of me … Continue reading Stop disempowering people – a talk at Health Product People
On my holiday, I started reading into some topics I ought to know more about: artificial intelligence, genomics, healthcare, and the fast approaching intersection of the above. Here follow some half-baked reckons for your critical appraisal. Please tell me what’s worth digging into more. Also where I’m wrong and what I might be missing. 1. … Continue reading AI, black boxes, and designerly machines
Other people's jobs are endlessly fascinating. At a birthday celebration a couple of years ago I got talking to Johnny, a family friend who works as an aquarium curator. He told me a surprising thing about his work: how little of his time he spends actually looking after the fish. Johnny's job is to look … Continue reading “Look after the water” – reflections 1 year into my work at NHS Digital
Mick Ward is sick of people trying to sell him electric woks. As chief officer leading transformation and innovation for social care in Leeds, he sees a never-ending procession of providers claiming to solve enduring human problems with expensive, complicated, isolated, digital solutions. Mick believes we'd do better to start with people and their communities, … Continue reading Electric woks or eating together? Time for human-centred designers to care about the community
Doteveryone CEO Rachel Coldicutt’s Medium post, ‘What if tech conferences don’t matter that much?’ landed just as we were wrapping up Leeds GovJam 2017. Here's me posing awkwardly with the awesome volunteer team who made this year's event happen... Every one of these people could, and should, stand on a platform and drop pearls of wisdom to an … Continue reading Now that’s what I call doing not talking
“In Elizabethan amphitheatres, like the 1599 Globe Theatre, performances took place in ‘shared light’. Under such conditions, actors and audiences would be able to see each other... This attention to a key original playing condition of Shakespeare's theatre enables the actors to play 'with' rather than 'to' or 'at' audiences. Actors therefore develop their ability … Continue reading In shared light: why making thing visible makes things better
Yeah, we're user-centred! Who are the people most present when our service is delivered? Where are they, physically and emotionally, at that moment? What could each of them put into our service, and what could they get out of it? What are we doing to better answer questions 1 to 3 this week? How are those people taking … Continue reading So we think we’re a user-centred, agile team…
Without exception, everyone I meet in the public sector wants to help make their service better. Most of them are in some way frustrated. The domain is massive and the activities disjointed. People engaged in any given service - from users and frontline workers down to managers and policymakers - can go for months on end … Continue reading Most of government is mostly service design most of the time. Discuss.
There's never been a more exciting time to be designing services in the public sector. But it can still be a lonely existence - in any organisation, a small number of advocates may find themselves trying to shift a large mass with plenty of inertia. The Service Design in Government conference that I attended last week has an … Continue reading 90% archaeology: my notes and reflections on Service Design in Government 2015
I first wrote this as a comment on Joel Bailey's excellent blog post titled 'This thing called agile might kill us all' but thought it worth re-hashing and expanding here. For context, Joel writes about "working for a big high street bank. The brief is to redesign the ‘end to end mortgage experience’. The timescale is to reach … Continue reading The Last Target Operating Model You’ll Ever Need™
Matt Edgar writes here 