Work — Product Strategy
Rethinking how people access healthcare for the first time
11 → 1
apps consolidated into one
38M
people reached
2 sprints
from brief to delivery
The ask: a decade of vision, in two sprints
The Deputy Director wanted a design vision for where the NHS App goes next, aligned to the NHS 10 Year Plan. 38 million users. One of the most diverse user bases in the country.
There were two objectives. Make the NHS App feel like it belongs in the next decade. Then convince the people running the country that design is how you get there.
I started with the technology, not the user
Vision work usually starts with user needs, in this case I went backwards.
The NHS had a roadmap of what it planned to introduce. The obvious move was to design out from patient needs and hope the tech lined up. I took what was actually coming, then worked out what it would mean in someone’s life.
Two sprints doesn’t buy you a discovery phase, and a vision the NHS can’t deliver never reaches a single patient.
The brief was eleven apps. I delivered one.
The 10 Year Plan team shared a re-imagined NHS App that was actually eleven individual apps. Separate products for GP access, care, medicines, vaccines, choices and proxy access.
Overlapping functionality, siloed information, a fragmented view of a single person’s health. People want one place to go. Eleven apps is eleven things to learn, and it doesn’t match how anyone thinks about their own health.
So I worked with the NHS App Director to pull it apart and put it back together.
12
strategies analysed
70+
requirements prioritised
03
workshops
02
draft IAs
The output was one app, not eleven.
Every feature had to make sense to someone managing their health
The risk in starting from technology was ending up with a feature list instead of a story about people.
So every capability had to earn its place inside a real health journey. That gave me four:
- Blood glucose monitoring, with onward action. A wearable flags an abnormal reading, and an appointment is booked before the person has to pick up the phone.
- An intelligent route to care. Someone with a new symptom gets sent to the right place first time, not the back of the wrong queue.
- Managing a long-term condition. The day-to-day of a chronic illness, held in one place instead of scattered across letters and portals.
- Supporting family health. One person managing a whole family’s care without keeping four separate systems in their head.
Here’s the first of those, end to end.
Jayden receives and clicks on an NHS App notification, then logs in using Face ID.
Once in the app, Jayden lands within My Health, seeing an action to complete.
She reviews the data, and takes action by booking an appointment.
She receives a confirmation that the appointment has been booked.
On 18 March, Jayden joins the NHS App video appointment.
Jayden has her appointment.
Blood glucose monitoring, with onward action
AI as the thing underneath, not a feature on a screen
A chatbot in the corner is the easy version. I designed AI as the connective layer, the thing that routes someone to the right care, surfaces the reading that matters, joins up a journey that would have been separate apps.
The current NHS App, and what a best-in-class version could look like
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Structure before polish
Low fidelity first, to stress-test the flows and sharpen the IA. Framed across 3, 5 and 10 year horizons to give the vision room to breathe.
Polish last. Two sprints only works if the structure’s settled before anything gets pretty.
It shaped how the app gets built
The work became the foundation for the NHS native design system, so the calls made in those two sprints are shaping how the app gets built for years.
Featured in the 10 Year Health Plan for England policy paper and by the Tony Blair Institute. Presented by the Prime Minister.