NHS England has published findings from its work on the NHS Healthy Choices Quiz, designed to gain insights on making personalised health advice easier to understand and act on for service users.
Completed more than 1.4 million times, the quiz highlighted themes including accessibility, design, and content for NHS tools, apps, and guidance.
On its ambition to create an experience that felt fun and engaging, NHSE notes that utilising iconography and colourful imagery, as well as a “relatable mascot”, Kenny the hamster, helped drive traffic to the quiz. Icons were used to demonstrate different answers to questions, and the mascot was used to share wellbeing tips in a fun and authentic way, it says.
Besides aesthetics, it focused on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to ensure descriptions were provided to support visuals. “An accessibility audit reinforced that aesthetic design and accessibility don’t need to compete with one another,” it states. “The most satisfying solutions were often the ones that achieved both.”
Colour was used on the results page to communicate focus areas and follow-up actions, and a test of two versions of the page found that offering a summary of results to help people immediately understand what they were doing well was preferable to “hiding information within expandable sections”. Adding these expandable sections “introduced friction without adding value”, NHSE explains, pointing to the learning that reducing visible content does not necessarily reduce complexity.
Key findings are also highlighted for speaking the user’s language. “During one of our internal design critiques, the conversation kept stopping at the same place – the alcohol questions,” NHSE says. “They were clinically accurate, but none of us answered them instinctively. We found ourselves translating everyday drinking habits into units and percentages before we could continue.” To overcome this, unit-based questions were replaced with questions about the drinks consumed, using visual icons to represent types of drink, and splitting complex questions into multiple pages where necessary. “The redesign didn’t change the information we needed from users, but we were able to reduce the cognitive effort required to get it,” NHSE adds.
These findings were presented by Adeline Leon, interaction designer at NHS England.
Wider trend: Patient engagement
NHS England has announced an “overhaul of patient communications”, to detail standards for regular updates at least every 12 weeks for those on waiting lists in a plan to ensure a consistent “customer service” approach. Eight new minimum standards for patient experience have been developed in collaboration with patients and stakeholders including The Patient’s Association and sent out to all NHS providers of planned care, NHSE shares. Trusts will be expected to publish an annual summary of their performance against these standards to promote transparency.
Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust has contracted the Zesty patient engagement portal, with a contract value of £155,000. In a call-off from a framework agreement, the trust has awarded the contract to London-based Zesty Limited for the patient engagement portal via the NHS SBS framework, with the contract set to run to the end of March 2027.
Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust has shared plans to redesign care pathways, transform care, and realise efficiency and productivity improvements with the use of AI, automation, and digital tools. The trust looks to its patient experience portal to support appointment management, patient communication, and integration with the NHS App. It plans for information systems to be integrated with health and care partners and a focus placed on developing health analytics capabilities for population health insights.
