Discovery on NHS England’s digital communication channels
NHS England was only 3 years old when we were asked to run a GDS-aligned Discovery on their digital communication channels, which included a website, email bulletins, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.
The Discovery had a broad scope, touching on ways of working in a newly established organisation, a range of related channels, and a lot of content – NHS England had published some 21,000 pieces of content over 3 years.
We began with activities to understand the particular context of the organisation, by interviewing stakeholders, and by reviewing numerous written plans, strategies and policies produced by teams across the organisation.
We engaged users of NHS England digital channels through a series of 1-2-1 user interviews, workshops, surveys, and usability and feedback sessions
And we augmented this by conducting a social media review, a content review and by running a content ecosystem mapping exercise in order to meet the specific goals of the project.
We made recommendations covering internal practices around content production and archiving, social media and bulletins, as well as recommending specific changes to the website information architecture, search and design to help users find the content they needed.
The NHS England team used our recommendations to build a business case to procure a supplier to make the necessary improvements to the website. And the team was also able to work with engaged stakeholders to make the necessary adjustments to ways of working across the different teams responsible for digital communication channels and content.
“Lagom Strategy helped us with a discovery project into NHS England’s digital communication channels. Before the project we had limited knowledge about our users and what they needed from us, at the end we had a clear view of who our main audience groups are and what the user needs are for each of these groups.
Matt Johnson, Content and User Experience Manager, NHS England
Throughout the project Lagom clearly explained everything they were doing and why they were doing it, we felt very involved in all of the work.
This sharing of knowledge and transfer of skills will really help in future projects that we undertake – to always make sure we are focussing on the user and understand their needs.
Lagom talked to many stakeholders across the organisation as well as actual users to help understand organisational needs as well as the needs of our users.
Their experience of facilitating workshops involving a diverse mix of participants was invaluable and helped encourage lively discussion and debate, enabling us to quickly dive in to identify actual needs and helped to keep things on target and on schedule.
Lagom’s experience of the Government’s Digital by Default standards has helped us adhere to these principles and has started a transformational journey for NHS England that is really focussing on user needs.”
