Strictly for the vibes

While the team are making plans for what to design or research or build next, I’ve been hitting the road like some sort of wandering bard, telling the story of the work thus far. This past week I presented an update about our native re-platforming work to a handful of different groups. Some of these groups need to be kept up to date and some are just curious because the project is strange. Telling the story over and over again, modulating the points of emphasis each time, is a nice way to explore what aspects land with an audience.

There is a lot of ground to cover, but perhaps it is not surprising that the elements of the presentations that have garnered the most attention are the areas where we have deviated from our standard ways of working or ways of describing what we do. Texture, place-making, and vibes are the elements of the work that generate the most interest and elicit lots of questions. Those are not common topics around here but they are the words I’ve been using to emphasise how this work is special. The issues at hand are not about the value of a service, the clarity of content, or the efficiency of a journey. Rather, the elements that I have been focussing on are what kind of impression the overall experience makes on the end user. What emotions does it produce? Does it feel trustworthy? Can you sense where you are? What kind of mood does it inspire? These questions are subtle and the answers are elusive.

I realise that in our context, where access to care can be a frustrating or confusing experience for patients, making a fuss about what kind of vibe our products and services give off could sound absurd. It is touchy-feely hippie stuff in a world of brutal efficiencies, and yet everything I’ve seen over the last few months suggests it is really very important. Once upon a time, when gov.uk or nhs.uk were originally being conceived, this may have been a common topic of conversation. Today though, the basics of our design systems are largely settled and stable. Questions about how to produce the right feeling just don’t come up anymore, but providing care always has an emotional, affective dimension (biopsychosocial models of care, anyone?), so why shouldn’t this be part of how we discuss design languages?

We’re starting to untangle how to produce feelings. Our next steps are to isolate the novel variables and research them methodically so we can develop a more robust evidence base supporting (or rejecting) our current hypotheses. Given how interconnected the myriad design decisions we’ve made are, I know that this is going to be difficult.