NHS Digital

We explain how we are using user centred design to improve health and care.

NHS Digital Design Matters

A place to share experiences and learning about putting users' needs at the heart of digital services and technology.

Get email alerts when we publish new Design Matters posts.

Decorative image of a crowd with hexagons joined by lines above them

We had to follow the data, not our users

Chiara Garattini and Kate Burn explain how working in our Data and Analytics sub-directorate has challenged the assumptions of our user-centred design team.

A photograph of a crowded UK high street.

What is inclusive design and why is it important?

Samuel Martin and Ellen Doyle have been leading the development of principles to help teams at NHS England design more inclusively.

How do you put a digital service on paper?

User researcher Fern Williams describes how we created a new paper patient registration form to complement the online ‘Register with a GP surgery’ service, allowing everyone to have a consistent user experience and leaving no one digitally excluded.

Fern Williams

User Researcher,

Improving the Data Access Request Service

Senior content designer Jessamine Marie explains how her team used user-centred design principles to put people at the heart of redesigning our Data Access Request Service.

Jessamine Marie

Senior Content Designer, NHS England

The author Josh Healey standing in front of a white board

Why accessible design is good design

Josh Healey, User-Centred Design Lead for the Register with a GP surgery service, explains how redesigning the first page of the service made it more accessible for everyone – and how they created a framework to measure impact.

Josh Healey

Design Lead, NHS England

Father holding his sleeping infant child.

Using meningitis pictures and video on 111 online

Paul Pod, Interaction Designer in the NHS 111 online team, explains how they have improved information about meningitis symptoms by adding multimedia content to triage questions.

Paul Pod

Interaction Designer, NHS England

Why we've put sustainability into the NHS digital design principles

Tero Väänänen, Head of Design in NHS England’s Transformation directorate, explains the new NHS digital design principle focused on sustainability.

Tero Väänänen

Head of Design, NHS Digital

Collage image of 3 people in front of a screenshot of the NHS website surrounded by cubes representing different content types.

Using content types to transform the NHS website

How do you make sure all content is user-centred, accessible, safe and accurate when your product is one of the largest and most used health websites in the world? Mark Robinson, Senior Content Designer, explains our approach.

Mark Robinson

Senior Content Designer,

Glasses of alcohol being clinked together

Helping people think straight about alcohol

David Evans, content designer for the Register with a GP surgery service, says it’s difficult to get accurate answers about people’s smoking and alcohol consumption – and explains what the team is doing to improve the way people assess their intake.

David Evans

Content Designer, NHS Digital

Don’t reinvent the wheel: What we’ve learnt from 2 years of research operations

How do you enable researchers to do their best work? Claire Holt, founder of the research operations team at NHS Digital, shares her experience of building a successful service that has now broadened its remit to supporting the whole user-centred design team.

Claire Holt

Programme Manager,

A child watches a woman puts the end of a rapid covid test swab into a small tube of liquid

COVID-19 testing: Tackling eligibility

Caroline Finucane, Lead Content Manager in the COVID-19 testing programme, explains her team’s challenges when ensuring only eligible users could order a free COVID-19 test.

Caroline Finucane

Lead Content Manager, COVID-19 testing programme,

The author Tero Väänänen standing outside the NHS Digital offices in Leeds

Products deliver outputs, services deliver outcomes

Tero Väänänen, Head of Design at NHS Digital, explains why we must shift our focus from outputs to outcomes so the public can truly get what it needs from the NHS.

Tero Väänänen

Head of Design, NHS Digital

Why creating an online service is more than just digitising a form

Kerrie Hughes, Lead Service Designer for the new ‘Register with a GP surgery’ service, says registration is more than just paperwork – it’s about giving more people access to healthcare and helping GP practices to provide great care.

Kerrie Hughes

Lead Service Designer,

A collage picture of hands of patients registering with a doctor's practice with a map of different geographical areas in the background.

Overcoming barriers to GP registration

Everyone should be able to register with a GP surgery. Senior User Researcher Tamara Farrar worked with seldom heard groups to ensure their needs were considered when designing a new registration service.

Tamara Farrar

Senior User Researcher, NHS Digital

Running a design sprint to make things easier for screening staff 

How do you tackle a big design challenge in a short span of time? Samantha Saw, Senior Service Designer, and Simon Davis, Senior User Researcher, explain how their team went from a handful of high-level ideas to a clickable prototype for the breast screening programme in just 10 days.

Screenshot of new health content standard at https://service-manual.nhs.uk/content/standard-for-creating-health-content

A new standard for creating health content

Sara Wilcox, senior content designer and Joe Freeman, social and digital media lead, both with NHS.UK, introduce the new ‘Standard for creating health content’ and explain work with partners, including YouTube, to put it into practice.

Someone views the gender questions on their mobile phone as they go through the process of booking a vaccine on the national booking service.

Making booking a vaccine more inclusive

The team developing the COVID-19 vaccine booking service changed questions about gender to improve the service for transgender and non-binary people, says Senior Content Designer Laura Hajba.

Laura Hajba

Senior Content Designer, NHS Digital

The author Tosin Balogun at our Leeds office.

Trying to be less "demanding on the brain"

Tosin Balogun, Associate Interaction Designer for the NHS website, looks at how we design and how we try to make a difference.

Tosin Balogun

Associate Interaction Designer, NHS Digital

White numbers '1999' displayed on a black background.

How a 20-year-old standard is still relevant today

It was born 8 years before the iPhone and a year before Google got into the advertising business, but Tero Väänänen says 'BS EN ISO 9241-210' remains a guiding star for human-centred design.

Tero Väänänen

Head of Design, NHS Digital

What is your problem?

Tero Väänänen, Head of Design at NHS Digital, considers the Cheshire Cat’s wise words to Alice and explains why it is important to define the problems we are addressing before trying to solve them.

Tero Väänänen

Head of Design, NHS Digital

How NHS Digital is developing user-centred design maturity

Rochelle Gold, Head of User Research at NHS Digital, describes how our user-centred design maturity model helps teams to achieve outcomes and manage risk.

Rochelle Gold

Head of User Research,

A woman accesses the NHS website to look up information about screening tests in pregnancy on her mobile phone.

Creating content that saves lives

Rich Kelly from the NHS website’s multimedia team explains how they provide video that is accessible, relatable and sometimes life-saving for their audiences.

Rich Kelly

Multimedia Designer, NHS.UK

Collage image showing a hand squeezing a COVID-19 sample from a vial onto a lateral flow device with QR codes overlaid on top.

Building a testing service that works for everyone

Kate Every, Service Designer for the NHS Test and Trace programme, looks at how using data and research helped the team meet the challenge of ensuring anyone within the UK population could carry out a lateral flow test for COVID-19.

Kate Every

Service Designer, NHS Digital

Close up of someone’s hands. The person has brown skin.

Making content about skin symptoms more inclusive

Rhiannon Smith, Content Designer for NHS.UK, explains how the NHS website team are making content about skin symptoms more inclusive.

Rhiannon Smith

COVID-19 testing: 5 things I’ve learnt as content lead

Caroline Finucane, who leads the content team for the COVID-19 testing service, shares some principles that will be useful for anyone working on a fast-paced, complex government project.

Caroline Finucane

Lead Content Manager, COVID-19 testing programme,

It takes a village to design a service

Tero Väänänen, Head of Design at NHS Digital, talks about how important it is to design your organisation before you start designing services.

Tero Väänänen

Head of Design, NHS Digital

User researchers watch how patients navigate a website when searching or using NHS services.

Do we need to drop the 'user'?

NHS Digital’s Head of User Research, Rochelle Gold, asks the question – is it time to drop the ‘user’ from user research?

Rochelle Gold

Head of User Research,

Making it as easy as possible to take a test

Matthew Lund, who heads up the User Research team that works across the online COVID-19 Testing service, talks about the challenges of ensuring user research remains at the forefront of a vital, fast-moving and high-profile programme.

Matthew Lund

Lead User Researcher, NHS Digital

Senior User researcher Simon Davis sits at his desk.

How do users get forgotten?

Simon Davis, a senior user researcher who works across our screening programmes, explains how important it is to get stakeholders involved in designing services that truly meet peoples’ needs.

Simon Davis

Senior User Researcher, NHS Digital

Meeting user needs in the face of winter

Brie Whyatt, Interaction Design Graduate, explains how the NHS App team improved the appointment booking process in the app by creating user stories, using the NHS digital service manual and doing usability tests to help patients and GP surgeries during this exceptionally challenging winter.

Brie Whyatt

Interaction Design Graduate, NHS Digital

Post-it notes talk about examples of user-centred design in practice and case studies of digital systems where good user-centred design has been used

Joining forces to champion user-centred design

Matt Edgar, Victoria Betton and Simon Dixon introduce a new industry working group set up to bring the NHS and tech sector together to advance the cause of user-centred design in health and care

An empty chair in a studio depicts how we need to fill that chair and put the user at the heart of everything we do.

How to place users at the heart of multimedia storytelling

Adriano Gazza, Multimedia team lead for the NHS website, explains how the principles of user-centred design can help create engaging video, animation and infographic content for the public that is clinically accurate.

Adriano Gazza

Senior Multimedia Manager, NHS Digital

Photo of blind man holding mobile phone close to his ear

Going remote: How we adapted our accessibility research

As we enter another national coronavirus lockdown, Mitchell Wakefield, one of our user researchers for NHS login, reflects on what he learned doing remote research with blind and low-vision users during the first lockdown and shares his tips on how to get it right.

Mitchell Wakefield

User Researcher, NHS Digital

A drawing of a double diamond explains how we ask what problems need solving and deploy user research to solve them in the right way.

Design is the strategy

Tero Väänänen, Head of Design at NHS Digital, explains why user-centred design is strategic.

Tero Väänänen

Head of Design, NHS Digital

Photo of researchers looking at what works best for users of NHS services online

10 ways the NHS digital service manual can help you

If you want to build easy-to-use digital health services that put people first, Adrian Smith explains why the NHS digital service manual is a great place to start.

Adrian Smith

Product Manager for the NHS digital service manual,

NHS App: Conducting user research in lockdown

Conducting user research remotely is challenging but can yield unexpected benefits. Brigit O’Sullivan, User Researcher at NHS Digital, describes what she learned working as a user researcher for the NHS App during lockdown..

Brigit O'Sullivan

User Researcher, NHS Digital

In a crisis, double down on user needs

Matt Edgar, Associate Director of Design and User Research at NHS Digital, explains why user centred design is vital in a pandemic – not a ‘nice to have’ – in the first NHS Digital Design Matters blog post.

Matt Edgar

Ex Associate Director of Design and User Research,