Keeping to the ‘user centric’ ethos of the Learning Hub is crucial for our design and development teams and that’s why our user research team has been busy over the last couple of months; sharing prototype screens with users, and ensuring that we hold firm to our promise of delivering a Learning Hub that everyone can be proud of.
Over the last two to three months some key areas of the Learning Hub’s design have been put in front of users, from all over the UK and from a variety of NHS and healthcare backgrounds, to ensure that what we’re the team is proposing, meets the needs of the users.
The ability for users to share content across NHS communities and the wider health and care sector is a key element of the new platform. For this to happen we have carried out a series of one-to-one, task-driven user research sessions. Each session focused on seeing how users interact with screen designs and testing vital user journeys, while also gathering invaluable feedback and thoughts on how we might improve upon our proposed designs and make this particular journey as user-friendly as possible.
The uptake on these sessions was very good and the feedback gathered has already been fed back to the service team designers. We’re now beginning to see the fruits of our labour with fresh ideas, originating from user research, helping to improve this part of service.
Our most recent piece of user research has seen us carry out similar sessions to test the proposals for the new Learning Hub ‘Landing Page and Dashboard’. A slightly different approach was adopted, as it was even more important to understand users’ initial thoughts, expectations and general feedback, on what are to be two of the most important pages of the Learning Hub. Previous sessions had looked at specific journeys that users are likely to make.
As is always the case, we’re now exploring how we can take this feedback and work it, where possible, into the designs and prototypes, and match user expectations as best we can.
Looking forwards, we have a very busy schedule coming up, with user research sessions planned around ‘Searching for Resources and Filtering/Viewing Results’, as well as a proposed user workshop on ‘Forums’. Both these topics present huge challenges for our designers and developers as they too will come together to form integral functionality of the Learning Hub, and we must strive to get them right first time. This is why user research is proving to be an integral part of our development cycle.
If you would like to be involved in user research, please sign up to our user registration programme.
For more information about the Learning Hub visit www.hee.nhs.uk/tel and follow us on Twitter: @HEE_TEL.