NHS Innovation Service: supporting innovation in healthcare
Sparck BJSS worked with the NHS Accelerated Access Collaborative to build the Innovation Service. The service aims to help innovators to take their healthcare innovation from idea to adoption, by matching them with the relevant support organisations.
Service Designer & Design Lead: Pedro Falcao; Product designer: Louise Hill; UX Researcher: Paula Rodrigues; Tech team: Sparck BJSS & Mastek; Product ownership & SME’s: NHS Accelerated Access Collaborative
Challenge: improve the service before it goes Live (Public Beta phase)
The GDS (Government Digital Services) provides a framework that is split into 4 distinct phases: Discovery, Alpha, Beta (Private and Public Beta), and Live. During the Public Beta phase, the service was made available to the public, and improvements were made based on usage analytics and insights from user research.
Using system analytics to identify some of the pain points
An analysis of the system analytics from the previous phase (Private Beta) allowed us to understand how people are behaving while using the platform, and identify a few pain points on the user journey: onboarding and filling in the innovation record.
Using qualitative research to gain a better understanding of the user needs
In collaboration with the Product Designer and the UX Researcher, we devised a plan to tackle the research questions through the collection of data, synthesis of the insights, ideation, and testing. Phases 1 and 2 were carried out during the initial sprints of the project. Phases 3 and 4 were repeated in each subsequent sprint until the end of the project.
Phase 1: Exploratory research
Method: retrospective interviews
Aim: extract high-level insights from users; gain a better understanding of the problems; inform the Delivery Roadmap V1
Who: UX Researcher (interviewer), Service Designer, and Product Designer (observers)
Interviewees: users from the 4 user groups (Innovators, Needs Assessment team, Qualifying Accessors, and Accessors)
Phase 2: Research analysis and synthesis
Method: Affinity Mapping workshop
Aim: Identify the right problems; generate problem statements to create the Delivery Roadmap V1;
Who: UX Researcher, Service Designer, and Product Designer
Evidence-driven story map
Method: Delivery Roadmap
Insights: retrospective interviews, data analytics, and business priorities
Aim: use the insights from the retrospective interviews and the business priorities to create a birds-eye view of the user experience from end-to-end, and trigger discussions about solving problems for the organisation and for the users.
Who: UX Researcher, Service Designer, Product Designer, and Technical Architect
Phase 3: Ideate &Test
Methods: As-is usability testing (optional) + Prototyping + To-be usability testing + Prototyping
Aim: Identify usability issues and opportunities for improvement of a particular existing feature or user journey + prototype accordingly + test new prototype + make the necessary amends
Who: Product Designer (As-is usability testing and prototyping) and User researcher (To-be usability testing). The aim was to avoid confirmation bias by having different people designing and testing
Phase 4: Delivery
In this phase, I worked with Software Engineers, QA, and Project Managers to implement the solutions devised.
