NHS website redesign and design system
Overhauling the brand, style, accessibility and scalability of England's biggest health website
In 2017, I joined a team looking at the redesign and rebrand of NHS.UK – a site then known as NHS Choices, which would eventually simply become the NHS website. Working with the strategy lead, my role was to help set the creative direction of the new site, as it moved away from its previous role as health encyclopedia and way of picking a hospital, to its new role of providing actionable health content and being a starting point for digitally-enabled services.
Consolidation of best practice
Building on the existing content strategy and various alpha and beta services that had been created, I had to bring disparate product teams together, to build a consensus on how various aspects of the site – accessible patterns, navigation, colour schemes and components – would be consolidated into a design system.
Adapting the GOV.UK design system
A lot of public money had already been invested in the GOV.UK design system, which had set many standards already. We did not wish to waste time redesigning patterns that we knew already worked. However, we knew that the NHS is a brand in its own right, and interacting with it is a different experience to government, so the team worked to adapt existing GOV.UK patterns to express the NHS brand effectively. I wrote about that on a guest blog post for GOV.UK.
A website for everyone
We had a large, multidisciplinary team examining how to adapt the existing website and its components to the new design, which required regular communication with individual project teams, site editors, and the sponsors of the work. We did extensive research and usability testing with participants with a range of access needs and disabilities. Particular attention was also made to web performance, so that people in areas of poor mobile network could still access the information they needed.
The redesigned website was launched in September 2018, and the first iteration of a publicly usable design system was launched in December the same year. Following these launches were continuous improvements, and the establishment of a governance group for new design system components.
The NHS design system and service manual were critical tools in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, where hundreds of people suddenly had to design and deliver services, but who had previously no experience of designing for health.
If you are interested in more of the detail around the design system, and context in which it was created, I have written six blog posts on Medium about it.