INFECTIOUS DISEASE SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM

National Tuberculosis Surveillance System

 

Tuberculosis is the number one cause of death from an infectious disease

 

As of 2018 one-quarter of the world’s population is thought to be infected with TB

 

The National Tuberculosis Surveillance System is a reporting and monitoring system used by a range of clinicians, epidemiologists, commissioning teams & policy makers.

 

 

This is the story of the work I completed on the National Tuberculosis Surveillance System – a project combining Public Health England, NHS & Softwire, a design agency. The project was completed over a period of 3 months.

 

 

My Role

Service Designer

Team comprised of a range of contractors in varying locations working together for the first time, with a team of developers ready & waiting to start development for several weeks before design commenced.

Prior to commencement of design phase, due to the high risk nature of the subject matter & politically sensitive nature of the project, stakeholders had been slow & hesitant to make decisions on the service or to provide detail on requirements.

  • Service Design
  • Stakeholder workshops
  • Rapid sketching
  • UX Design
  • UI Design
  • Senior stakeholder presentation

Eliciting Feedback From The Client/Approach

With developers waiting, it was imperative to produce a set of designs they could begin development with. Rather than returning to the client with additional questions, I started by workshopping with stakeholders to articulate a vision of a “Story of Success” for the project overall, to build consensus on approach & to gain an initial step of progression. This helped to build trust & momentum at the start.

MAPPING COMPLEX CLINICAL PROCESS

The lifecycle & process behind surveillance & management of the disease is complex & lengthy. And the range of users of the system is wide & varied. I needed to quickly understand the processes involved via a rapid discovery dive into the users & the current clinical systems.

 

 

SKETCHING FOR RAPID RESULTS

I was then able to lead the client through a series of sketching workshops to quickly solicit requirements, at the same time as ensuring rapid decisions on draft designs, with the philosophy of user testing as design “insurance”.

We front loaded the design process, to output rapid prototypes which could then be user tested, and iterated upon in later dev sprints.

This way we were able to create a flow/vision, piece by piece as confirmation on assumptions and decisions came in ad hoc/due to politics & confirmation of budget shuffling as project progressed.

Rolling user testing

We conducted rolling user testing throughout the design process, so that each sprint included user testing for the coming sprints.

Outcome

The project had limited budget for Service Design, with the development team resources stretching several months farther.

To guide the developers I produced a set of page templates & a style guide using the sketches as a basis. This allowed the devs to continue development & the client to feel confident that any further requirements changes could be accommodated.

The designs were based on the sketches & flows I had previously created.