Apps, C-19 & Politics — Has this been a lethal cocktail?
This opinion piece is a response to the failure of the Track and Trace App — there have been mistakes made — and these suggest shortcutting established UX design processes, possibly due to govt pressure, at some significant cost. If the UX profession is to engage in this work, it must stand its ground — we need to understand what happened, learn and change.
Remember May 4th? The Track and Trace App coming to rescue faltering faith in our senior management team. Matt Hancock un-leashing expectations and a civic duty (if you live in the IOW) to download the app which will be rolled out nationally by Mid-May.
But hang-on. Are there one or two teeny history lessons to consider before running out the door shouting “LET DO THIS !!”?
Perhaps PPE shortages or C19 testing delays could have come to mind? But hey, when you’re close to the top of fatalities leader-board and you’ve ratings to consider — pausing for thought is so yesterday’s thing.
Since then, it’s gone a bit pear shaped. Deja-vu is not the only mental state of the moment. Amnesia’s up there too, as evidenced by Lord Bethell of Romford’s (the minister responsible for the smartphone app) announcement on June 17th that the governments not really feeling ‘great time pressure’ over the app, and certainly they don’t want to rush something out that is not “quite right” and remarkably, that it is ‘not a priority for the government at the moment’. At the risk of pedantry, this seems to be a more than trivial rewrite of the hype of those first few fanciful weeks — god forbid anyone should think No 10 are trying to re-frame the narrative.
Referring to the IOW App trial, Lord Bethell continued “One of the things it has taught us is that it is the human contact that is the one most valued by people. And in fact there is a danger of being too technological and relying too much on text and emails and alienating or freaking out people because you’re telling them quite alarming news through quite casual communications.”
No shit Sherlock. It’s not fit for purpose. Schoolboy Error no 1 is it hasn’t been designed with humans in mind, Error no 2, remarkably, it’s not been designed with technology in mind either (the app could only recognise 4% of the iphones it came into contact with).
What’s odd is that it was delivered by the NHSX — the digital arm of the NHS — whom I’m sure normally do an excellent job. So, is it possible they were slightly leaned on? Is it remotely credible that government could have told them what it would do and how it should work? That’s a red-flag for independent digital agencies worth their salt, who will diplomatically push back. But with the government in a tight spot, pushing back could easily have been spun into the school maam’ish admonition “that’s not very helpful”.
Muscle was presumably applied. It’s accepted practice in digital that time spent in a little bit of research is seldom wasted (apologies Sun Tzu). If only to make sure it’s the right thing for the people you want to use it. Design research establishes whether people need and will use what you have in mind — before you commit the farm to building it. UX specialists have careers doing just this.
The NHSX team will know this, and whilst there has been much made of the benefit of speeding up digital development in the light of lock down, when it’s a really high-profile app designed to save lives, not doing basic research to establish whether it will to be used seems a failure of 101 UX methods training.
Whilst Lord Bethell’s un-peerlike use of the phrase ‘freaking out’ is commendable, dressing up the fact it’s gone spectacularly wrong isn’t. The findings he reports could have been identified early by a competent design team, without enslaving the population of the Isle of Wight — maybe just a couple of hundred people or a small market town.
This should have happened before government dug deep into their pockets, before announcements were made and before time was burnt when time was of the essence.
Speed and quality were needed and both have been lost. Perhaps government should have been told ‘We won’t assume your solution is right, we will do some research, design and test it with users as it rapidly develops and we will objectively seek out flaws in thinking and design and not ride your tide of PR”
This is not a hindsight issue — digital design processes are established and well understood. But this is a repent at leisure issue — there has been enormous opportunity cost — money, time, public confidence and maybe lives.
So lessons learned ? If you work in digital, stick to your guns, have faith in the process, and if it’s safety critical don’t give way under pressure ever — it’ll come back and bite you. Let’s find out what happened here and learn from it.
