Beta Phase User Research on Health Education England’s National Website Platform
We were asked by Health Education England to be the research partner for the development of their new National Website Platform as it entered its Beta phase. The project aims to rationalise 200+ websites onto a single web platform to improve the user experience for trainees across the healthcare workforce.
We led the research as part of a multidisciplinary delivery team to ensure that decisions were underpinned by genuine user need.
The project work itself was carried out across two distinct strands. The first looked at individual sites moving on to the Platform to ensure that the components were being designed with users in mind. Over the course of a year the Knowledge and Library Services website moved through private and public Beta, whilst a Dental Education Hub site also progressed through a private beta.
The second strand of work focused on developing the Platform as a Service that would be capable of onboarding HEE’s existing website real estate as well as dealing with consistent requests for new websites. This involved significant service design to consider the end to end experience of digital teams who want to move an existing website onto the Platform infrastructure, or create a new web presence from scratch.
To deliver on the Platform as a Service strand we interviewed product owners from across HEE to understand what they needed from the National Platform team to ensure a smooth transition to the site. We also ran workshops with senior HEE decision makers to shape the organisational strategy needed for this work to be successful. Finally, in the spirit of continuous improvement, we spent time speaking to teams from Knowledge and Library Services and Dental Education to understand their experiences as the first sites to be built on the Platform.
This work enabled the HEE team to build individual sites that meet the needs of Healthcare trainees and the health workforce, but also shape a process that meets the needs of HEE’s internal users who are responsible for the organisation’s web content.
