September 02, 2016
In this, the second of three posts on our recent data project at My NHS, we look at another of the main challenges we faced: how to gain valuable user insights to inform iterative development.
September 02, 2016
In this, the second of three posts on our recent data project at My NHS, we look at another of the main challenges we faced: how to gain valuable user insights to inform iterative development.
Valtech have always been firm proponents of agile delivery and user-centric design, and have been instrumental in the Government Digital Service transformation, a fundamental principle of which is a focus on user needs. As such, our challenge was to identify, meet, and work with relevant users of the My NHS service to achieve the main goal of any Discovery phase – establish that a user need exists for a digital service. So how did we do this within such a spiders’ web of an organisation as the NHS, in such a short space of time?
So how did we do this within such a spiders’ web of an organisation as the NHS, in such a short space of time?
Engage stakeholders from the start
Working with the My NHS product owner we quickly established four main areas of health on which to start to focus, namely Hospital, Mental, Dental and Cancer care. We ensured that stakeholder specialists from all of these attended our Discovery kick-off meeting, to act as representatives and thus streamline access to applicable users for research.
Furthermore we used the following project inception techniques to drive value from user access:
Results
Based on the outputs of our Agile and Lean UX techniques in the Discovery kick off, we were able to schedule user testing labs in advance and thus gain valuable user insights across our two core focus areas. This helped us to produce a number of iterated UX prototypes of the My NHS service in just 2 weeks, validating the existence of a user need and thus paving the way for an Alpha phase.
We look forward to showing these plus the broader results of the project at the upcoming NHS Expo in Manchester. We’ll be on stage at 1pm on Thursday 8th September.