NHS Innovation Service
Accelerating innovations for improved patient care
Skill areas
Service Design
Design Research
Design Sprint Facilitation
Prototyping & Testing
Accessibility & Usability Testing
Strategic Roadmapping
Content Design
Agile
Background
NHS England needed a single, national, online service for health innovators seeking to navigate the innovation pathway and the NHS infrastructure. Our goal was to design a service that would accelerate the best innovations to the NHS by providing useful information to innovators; attracting innovators to submit their innovations; and supporting collaboration among different organisations and with innovators.
Output and outcome
28 rounds of research and testing
Iterated UX/UI for improved functionality
Designed interactions and features for 4 user groups (Messages, Manage Users, Milestones, Exit Flows, etc.)
Comprehensive notifications system
Established research framework and feedback loops
Scaled service to over 700 innovations
Passed GDS Live Assessment
Project intro
Project length: 12 months
Client: NHS Accelerated Access Collaborative - NHS England
Team composition: 12 members, including:
4 User-Centered Designers covering content, research, service design, product
Business analysts, delivery manager, product owner, developers, data analysts, QAs
Methodology: Agile, with iterative sprints
Tools: Figma, Mural, Jira, Qualtrics, Confluence
My role:
As a Senior Researcher and Service Designer, responsibilities included:
Conducting both qual and quant research
Mapping user journeys and identifying pain points
Leading workshops to co-create strategy and design ideation
Leading Design Team process and prioritizing for roadmap
Facilitating service blueprinting for end-to-end delivery
Managing cross-functional collaboration with IT providers and other stakeholders
Track and manage KPIs, feedback loops and research repository
Challenges:
The NHS Innovation Service project aimed to address several key challenges faced by healthcare innovators:
Long timelines: Innovators often face over 10 years to integrate into the NHS.
Complex pathway: Difficult-to-navigate system leaves innovators unclear on necessary steps.
Lack of collaboration: Limited coordination between organizations and with innovators, creating silos.
Repeated efforts: Innovators frequently have to ‘knock on doors,’ repeatedly explaining their vision to multiple organizations.
Other challenges we faced upon entering the project included:
The platform needed to serve a broad spectrum of users, including healthcare innovators, evaluators, and administrators, each with distinct goals and pain points. Balancing these needs required extensive research to ensure the platform was equally accessible and valuable for all user groups.
Innovators navigate multiple, often complex, stages in the innovation process, from initial submission to scaling and evaluation. Designing a seamless journey for innovators at different parts of their journey, while incorporating multiple touchpoints, was challenging. It required creating flexible, modular design elements that could adapt to different stages and user requirements.
The project involved collaboration with various NHS stakeholders, each with different priorities and perspectives on healthcare innovation. Aligning these viewpoints and obtaining buy-in for user-centered design decisions was a continuous process, requiring careful facilitation and regular workshops.
As a government healthcare project, the platform had to adhere to strict data privacy, accessibility, and compliance standards. Integrating these requirements into the design and development process, without compromising usability, added complexity and required thorough documentation and iterative testing.
The platform was intended to scale from supporting a few pilot projects to handling hundreds of innovations across the NHS. Ensuring scalability while maintaining performance and ease of use was a technical and design challenge, requiring robust infrastructure planning and adaptable design frameworks.
Approach:
Our team followed a structured yet flexible approach to UX research and design, ensuring that each phase of the process was iterative and insights-driven. Here’s how we approached each phase:
Discover
We began with a discovery phase, where we gathered in-depth information about user needs, preferences, and behaviors. This involved conducting interviews, desk research, surveys, and competitive analysis to build a solid foundation for understanding our users and the broader landscape.Define
In this phase, we synthesized our findings to create a clear definition of the problem. We developed personas, user journeys, and scenarios, alongside problem statements and affinity mapping. This step ensured everyone on the team was aligned on the core user issues and opportunities.Ideation & Prototype
Using the insights gathered, we moved into the ideation and prototyping phase. Our team engaged in ideation sessions to brainstorm and visualize potential solutions. We created interactive prototypes that allowed us to explore ideas quickly and make early design decisions.Test
Testing was a critical phase where we validated our solutions through usability testing, heuristic evaluations, A/B testing, and accessibility testing. We often used unmoderated testing to gather quick feedback and then refined designs. At this stage, we also prepared for the handover to the tech team to ensure a smooth transition to development.Measure
Post-launch, we continuously tracked metrics and KPIs to evaluate the performance of our designs. We reviewed analytics, gathered user feedback, and developed continuous improvement plans to refine and evolve our solutions based on real-world data.
This process allowed us to cycle back to previous phases as new insights emerged, ensuring a user-centered and adaptable approach that aligned with both user needs and business goals.
