Scaling Information Architecture for a growing digital service offering
Client
NHS App
Project Duration
12 weeks
Team
Content Designers, UX Designer, UX Researcher, Product Lead, Business Analyst, Developers
Platform
App, Web (desktop and mobile)
Project
UK’s most downloaded free iPhone app of 2021 with over 25 million users.
NHS Digital had commissioned Kainos to develop the NHS App, for citizens to access their national health services digitally.
Challenge
As the app had grown in user base, the program had integrated many new service offerings including those of third party suppliers.
But not all services were available to all users. Access depended on whether the user’s personal primary health care provider had opted in to those service integrations.
Because of this, the current information architecture had become messy and users were having trouble finding all the services available to them.
We also had to develop an additional IA for NHS App help and support content online.
Solution
App: Homepage
The NHS App homepage had several iterations during my time on the project.
I worked with a UX designer and user researcher to test the new ‘Popular services’ heading on the homepage.
We had several different iterations of the panel links on the homepage, but the biggest changes came when we integrated NHS COVID Pass, and the Check your COVID vaccination record service.
App: Your Health
Following the integration of several new personal health record services into the NHS App, I worked closely with a UX designer and user researcher to understand how the IA of the page might be improved. The aim was to ensure users were finding everything they could, as quickly as possible.
Identifying which items should live in this area proved easy, but required large amounts of development effort as we moved items into this area.
Using Sketch, I mapped out all possible versions of this area that a user might see depending on what third-party services their GP surgery or CCG had switched on.
This page was previously called ‘Medical record’, but following this piece of work and the ongoing integration of new services, I identified a need to update the heading to ‘Your health’ as it was more reflective of the new structure.
I worked with the team to define the panel link order, depending on the different user cases, and got final sign off from assurance and product management to go ahead with the design changes.
App: Messages and More
We reviewed the order and placement of the icons in the app. As ‘Messaging’ became a more prominent feature, we moved it from under ‘Settings’ to sit on the bottom tray viewable from all screens.
This displaced a section called ‘More’. So we merged ‘More’ into ‘Settings’ housed in the top-right corner.
Previously, we had moved some of the items from ‘More’ and ‘Settings’ into relevant areas of the app like ‘Your health’, and it was clear that this area needed completely rearchitecting, with a revised IA and nomenclature.
I worked with a UX designer to construct several possible versions of the area, based on UR findings and competitor analysis. We then took it into remote user testing sessions using a clickable prototype.
Once we were happy with the new structure, we presented to senior management, and planned the iterative development work with a BA to make the designs a reality without too much strain on the dev teams.
Web: NHS App Help & Support
In November 2020 I embarked on a mission to understand why our users were visiting our NHS App help and support content on the website, and whether they were successful in their troubleshooting.
I worked with a user researcher on the team to draft a survey of three simple questions, that we applied to all our help and support pages using Hotjar.
I personally reviewed and analysed these findings and created an easy to understand report with suggested next steps.
As part of these next steps, I mapped out a suggested new IA and navigation for our area of the website based on the UR findings.
To understand if the proposed IA was accurate, I tree tested it using Qualtrics. This identified our user’s mental models and helped shape the taxonomy and nomenclature of the pages.
I worked closely with the NHSD IA team to get agreement for the new IA including URL redirects. We worked with them to move our pages into the footer of the NHS website.
This movement gave us an independent place in the IA, whereas before we sat within a ‘Services’ section. This also meant we could have a shorter and simpler URL, so we were now working with nhs.uk/nhs-app.
We then made use of additional CMS functionality, using tiles and tabs instead of lists of links. So now the user could see more of what they needed, quickly should they enter from the help home page or the main NHS App page on the website.
A few months after completing this piece of work we were told that our help and support content was removing 90% of queries into the service desk.
OLIVIA THORNTON 