Mike Gallagher

The likelihood of me doing this every week is effectively zero, but this was an interesting week so hey why not.

This week was half term in the UK so it was very quiet at work, which in turn meant I got to a spend a lot of time thinking. In my current context, this is rare! Knowing that this is rare does not feel very good, but having time to get closer to a number of process and project things felt great, and now I want to change tons of stuff about the NHS App and the team (not sure my product friends are going to appreciate me having so much free time lol).

Part of that was working through the outputs of a UCD maturity workshop we ran last week with the app’s UCD Ops team. It is kind of brutal to run through a checklist of things you should be doing and consider “so are we actually doing this? are we even able to do that if we wanted to?”. In the end, things are going ok, but there’s plenty of room to improve. The more interesting parts are where we hit limits that we can’t surmount without changing the nature of our situation, which means changing the wider system we exist within. So, yeah, no biggee there.

Seemingly out of nowhere on the same team processes topic, I had a small surprise this week getting to spend some quiet time with a senior leader discussing how we might actually make some structural improvements to put ourselves in a better position to deliver in the future.

In project land, because one of the designers on the team (TB) is both kind and very thorough, I managed to spend a solid amount of time going “so what’s going on there then?”, with regard to the app’s login processes and how password managers are utilised. Time well spent, and thrilling to watch TB unpack their work while I nod along going “yes, yes, oh you’ve thought of that too, wow, yes”.

During this time I made a number of screen recordings on my phone to demonstrate some of the variations in how password managers interact with websites and apps. I made 11 (ELEVEN) videos in total and, dear reader, not a single one of them was the same as any others. Seeing them all lined up was bizarre. As a longtime password manager user I guess I’ve gotten used to this state of things, but I can’t work out how this much variation is even possible.

I had occasion to discuss seams again. This is a bit of a pet topic. I have an allergy to “seamless” as a descriptor or goal when it comes to digital services because usually what people mean is “a slick UI”. Plus, I think somewhere along the way (probably grad school) I appear to have really internalised the “truth to materials, honesty to content” bit of capital-M Modernism. In my context (the UK’s health system), where we need to navigate about 10,000 organisations operating under a shared banner, I really think there is value in the average system user (patient, clinician, admin staff, etc.) having a sense of how that system is put together. Making everything “seamless” makes it harder for said average system user to reason about what is happening to them, and that does not seem good to me at all. Anyway, shout out to TM for giving me a reason to get back into this topic.

I chaired our regular NHS England design leads check-in. Suffice to say I did not do a good job of keeping to time, but the conversation was very interesting (topics included Aristotle, Cynefin, lead vs principal vs manager, and what is “good enough”?).

I’m still working on finding a balance between “oh hey so I’ve got 70 questions about that button you just showed me, let us talk through every single one of them” and being able to neatly, precisely, ask just the question about the one most important thing.

Next week will bring a few chances to get into the detail of some important information architecture work and scenario planning for the next financial year. After a set of announcements about how NHS England will be changing to better support the government’s objectives, there is a lot to figure out.

I read a few interesting things this week:

• After encountering Scrum doesn’t say…, I went back and read the actual scrum guide. Pretty sure I have never done this before and it was very useful!
• Poking holes in reality with prototypes. This is lovely. Feels like it comes from a different time (hello BERG). There is something to say that connects my past (graphic design, thinking through making with physical stuff) and my current work-life, where everything is so incredibly complicated and diffuse. No idea what that is yet.
• UK Tech Secretary introduces Digital Driving Licence. Having spoken with the Gov.uk app team a bunch of times I’m very much enjoying watching their stuff creep out into the world. Go team. (Sidenote: I am completely perplexed by the repeated assertion that the work was all done in the last six months. This is verifiably untrue.)
• UX and CX Merge The Shift from Products to Journeys. So, umm, you mean “service design”, right?
• The Gulf Between Design and Engineering. I’m probably going to refer to this a lot. Useful for talking about why designers should work in code, why it is important for developers to be involved from the very beginning, and why the designer isn’t “done” until the thing exists as live working software. Elements of this article also gets at a feeling I often have, but can never quite articulate, about why I can’t ever finish design work in a layout programme (e.g. Figma) because even if it looks right there, once it is working as code it will always, somehow, be kind of wrong.