30 Aug 2025 - Matt Lucht
Despite being a short working week and plenty of people being away on holiday, it still felt pretty busy and, thankfully, quite productive too.
Much of the team’s focus has been around preparing for going into “private beta” for sending appointment invitations. I don’t want to tempt fate, but it feels as though we’re in quite good shape!
We’ve started another round of testing on the content for the appointment invitation. This time we used UserZoom for some unmoderated sessions, which allowed us to hear from a larger sample size. Our user researcher, Katy, is working through the analysis, but what we’ve seen so far is encouraging.
We’re making good progress building the queries to support the reporting that’ll help us understand what invitations were sent.
Moving to digital comms will mean that some of the reporting needs for breast screening offices will be different to what they currently have, and until we move that new way of working, it’s really hard to know exactly what all their future needs might be.
However, having the underlying data available gives us greater confidence that we can easily spin up different views of the data to help answer different questions. Something that we talked about a lot over at Digital Land – data vs information; eggs vs cakes!
Extracting data from information can be like trying to get eggs out of a cake. And while cake is ideal for people who want cake, given the raw ingredients we could also have pancakes, Welsh cakes and Yorkshire puddings.
Making data available as data rather than baked into one kind of information gives people the ingredients they need to freely build services, and to better inform people making lots of different kinds of decisions.
Source: It can be difficult to make data from information
Something that is causing us a bit of nervousness is around how clinic names and addresses might be stored within the underlying data – in particular, the mobile clinics.
As the name suggests, these mobile clinics move around, and often their “address” doesn’t give you their precise location. Most times they’ll be obvious to find, but we’ve heard of scenarios where this isn’t the case and will require some notes to help people figure out where they need to go:
Mobile clinic
Sainsbury’s Supermarket
Past the store entrance to the left end of the carpark and on the left hand side
10 South Colonnade
E14 4PU
The specification for the address data implies that we’ll get nice, cleanly structured addresses coming to us. But I’ve a little niggling feeling in the back of my mind that this might not be the case and when we start seeing some live data that perhaps some of these notes might have crept into the address.
It’s not stopping or blocking us on anything right now, and as soon as we can see some proper data, we’ll know whether everything will be OK, or if we need to rethink how we present the clinic locations in our invitation comms.