ROLE: DESIGN LEAD & SERVICE DESIGNER / YEAR: 2021 / CLIENT: NHS
NHS Innovation Service: supporting innovation in healthcare
As a result of this work, by 2023 (according to data from the NHS):
- 1,950 innovations were receiving support
- 1.2 million patients had access to proven innovations
- 2,750 jobs were created or safeguarded
- £740 million of investment was secured
- 1,290 contracts were awarded, worth £86 million
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.
As Design Lead and Service Designer, I led a small team (User Researcher and Product Designer), defined the research and design approach, and established Design and Research Ops to support a structured, user-centered process. I collaborated closely with the Tech Lead and Delivery Manager to align work across disciplines, and led stakeholder engagement with NHS teams to ensure the service met both user needs and strategic goals.
Challenge: improve the service during the Public Beta phase
The GDS (Government Digital Service) 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:
1. system analytics;
2. insights from user research;
1. 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 were behaving while using the platform and identify a few pain points in the user journey: onboarding and filling in the innovation record.
2. 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 0: Pre-Discovery
We began by analyzing the existing service to gain a deep understanding of the end-to-end user experience.
Phase 1: Understand the service
We started with retrospective interviews across the four main user groups to understand how the service was working in practice and where the biggest challenges remained. Combined with existing analytics, this gave us a clearer picture of user needs, pain points and opportunities across the end-to-end experience.
Phase 2: Turn research into priorities
We synthesised the research through collaborative affinity mapping, identifying recurring themes and translating them into clear problem statements. This created a shared understanding of what needed to improve — and why — and provided the evidence for our initial delivery priorities.
Phase 3: Build an evidence-led roadmap
We brought together qualitative research, behavioural analytics and business priorities in an end-to-end story map. This became a shared decision-making tool for Design, Product and Engineering, helping us prioritise problems, understand dependencies and sequence improvements across the service.
Phase 4: Design, test and iterate
For each priority, we ran as-is usability testing to identify issues in the existing experience, then designed and prototyped improvements before validating them through to-be usability testing. Findings fed directly into the next iteration.
Phase 5: Take solutions into delivery
I worked closely with Engineering, QA and Delivery to turn validated concepts into production-ready improvements. This meant resolving implementation constraints and trade-offs while protecting the underlying user need and design intent through to release:
The website navigation was improved with the introduction of Breadcrumbs, Back button, and Previous & Next buttons.
A Notification Centre was implemented: a centralized hub that aggregates all the Notifications.
The existing email set was optimized to enhance the user experience.
For example, we introduced a daily digest email to replace the multiple email notifications received by Innovators
Find out more
Matt Newman, Deputy Director of the Accelerated Access Collaborative, discusses the purpose behind the service, the support available, and how it aims to accelerate innovation adoption.