Researcher Experience
Overview
Our Future Health exists to help people live longer and healthier lives through the discovery and testing of more effective approaches to prevention, earlier detection, and treatment of diseases.
In order to achieve its mission, Our Future Health needs to attract researchers, they then need to:
- create an account
- apply to become a registered research
- apply for access to the data they require
This asks a lot of the users. The team needs to offer the best-in-class experience when it comes to applying for access to data and the tools available to conduct analysis.
All while ensuring the absolute highest standards of data security that in turn creates necessary barriers.
My role in the team
I joined Our Future Health in August 2022, as a small organisation I've had to work across multiple teams simultaneously. The researcher experience team was my main focus up until recently.
The researcher experience team have had to meet contractual dates of delivery and work across 3 products simultaneously. All while the organisation goes through lots of growth and change.
The 3 products are:
- A static website for our userbase detailing out information they need to make decisions and signpost to account creation
- A secure webapp that allows those that create an account to then apply to become a registered researcher and if successful, apply for access to the health data they require
- A database management product that allows internal colleagues to track, confirm or deny registration and access to data
In this team, my responsibilities included:
- Leading the interaction & visual design
- Organising, conducting and synthesising user research
- Creating prototypes to facilitate and co-design with users, in this case researchers across academia
- Supporting the product manager with research and evidence to confirm or invalidate assumptions
- Organising and facilitating team sessions - seeking clarity in a culture often determined by contractually agreed delivery dates
- Pairing closely with engineers to implement our open-source front-end (Our Future Health forked directly from NHS)
- Organising and facilitating co-design sessions with the team (engineers, content design, product design, business analyst and product manager)
- Ensuring we had regular design review sessions to challenge the feasibility of design proposals
Interaction design
Researchers applying to access data often takes many months. Our team were often reminded of this through user research so we have many opportunities to disrupt the norm and significantly improve the industry standard.
I investigated the Task List pattern, speak to people from GOV that were actively working on it. Helping us to move at pace while also addressing the needs of our users - we used the Task List pattern for our Researcher application form and Study application form, it allows our users to leave and reutrn to forms that ask a lot of them while saving their progress and 'ticking off' the tasks they have completed.
Visual design
We forked the NHS front-end so a lot of the front-end aesthetic is already decided for us. We make minor iterations and use colour palettes to determine different 'product personalities'. For all researcher experience touch-points, I created a small but flexible colour palette, giving us light, neutral, bright and dark colours to work with.
As we mature and the number of products increase, we are naturally creating components and patterns that are new to our front-end. This will give us further opportunities to slowly explore a visual language for Our Future Health.
User research
We got the 'researcher website' live in around ~3 months. I led on the early Figma prototypes and also conducted interviews.
We learned so much about our users, their top tasks, how their day-to-day life works and the information they needed immediately from Our Future Health.
Meeting the needs of users early allows for rapid progress.
Service design
Users must move across multiple statuses, domains and even products if they want to access the data they require for their research.
The data itself is within an external partner product - a Trusted Research Environment (TRE).
To highlight barriers, I use very simple maps, that highlight the pain points around security, authentication and moving between products.
The team and delivery
This team had challenges and differences in personalities. I often tried to be the bridge between those clashes and attempt to facilitate retros for people to speak openly.
For a significant time there was no tech lead, content designer, user researcher, agile delivery manager or business analyst.
But teams with autonomy and a strong mission will find ways to deliver.
