It’s been quite a ride. From the NHS alpha phase, adapting GOV.UK design patterns, and redesigning the NHS website, through to defining and sharing a system, which would ultimately be used by hundreds of practitioners in previously unthinkable circumstances, where next for the design system and service manual? It’s already…

Well. There’s not much to say about what work happened on the design system in 2020–21. The information architecture of the service manual had been reviewed and iterated. The team were taking stock and thinking what to do next. The NHS website content team had been working since January on…

The NHS design system was rooted in the redesign of the NHS website, but it was by no means the limit of what it could be used for. All sorts of services, systems and websites would be able to use this, in order to save time (and public money), improve…

While we were working towards our September launch of the redesigned website, we were also setting up a separate team to investigate how to standardise what we had, to make it easier for new work to be created. We’d obviously benefited greatly from the GOV.UK …

With all this activity going on, it was decided that the NHS Choices name was to be retired, and the website as a whole be redesigned. It was clear that as more of the system was undertaking ‘digital transformation’, that the main website would increasingly become a starting point, or…

No design system (well, no good one, anyway) has a simple beginning, with a team being assigned to ‘make a design system’. They form when multiple strands of work are eventually understood and codified, in order to achieve a wider desired outcome of efficiency and consistency. …

A year ago, I published a blog post about the challenges we face as a growing design profession in NHS Digital, and as an industry as a whole, when it comes to building diverse teams with an inclusive culture. …

I’ve been musing recently on the term ‘desire’, when it comes to the design of services in health and care. It’s a relatively old term in user experience and eCommerce that I remember from my days working on selling internet and mobile phone packages. Desire is your measure of how…

It’s a strange time to be working in service design, interaction design, or product development right now. If you’re working on a public service, or in health and care, or for charities, you’re probably having to work faster, and think more clearly, than you’ve ever had to before. …