Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/main' into doc/nbss-data-analysis

Author: micjustus-nc

app/book-a-vaccination/2025/10/improving-date-selection/choose-date-new.png

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+---
+title: "Making date selection more flexible "
+date: 2025-10-02
+---
+
+Our analytics on the National Booking Service (NBS) showed that 25% of users were clicking ‘show later dates’ when trying to find a suitable date for their appointment in NBS. 
+
+Based on this, we explored ways to improve the date selection process, making it easier for users to find a date that suits them without having to click through multiple pages. 
+
+###  The existing design
+
+The existing design used radios to show 5 dates per page, with pagination to show later dates. 
+
+![screenshot showing a screen with radios showing 5 dates the user can choose for their appointment, and pagination to allow the user to show later dates.](choose-date-old.png)
+
+## What we did   
+
+We thought about different ways we could ask users to pick a date.  We need to allow users to only choose dates with availability. 
+
+A lot of ways of collecting or choosing dates could potentially allow users to enter or choose dates that didn’t have open availability.  This could lead to frustration for users, and if they select several dates in a row without open availability, this could even lead users to drop out of the journey. 
+
+![screenshot showing design thinking around different ways to allow users to choose an appointment date.](date-ideation.png)
+
+We decided that the simplest approach to this issue would be to increase the amount of dates shown on the page.  
+
+We kept the number of dates at the top of the screen to try and avoid issues with page length and scrolling. 
+
+![screenshot showing a screen with radios showing 10 dates the user can choose for their appointment, and pagination to allow the user to show later dates.](choose-date-new.png)   
+
+ 
+
+## Findings   
+
+During research most users considered 10 dates to be more than enough, and felt they'd easily be able to find a time that suits them.   
+
+We released the new version of the page into the live service on the 15th of July. Since then we have observed a 72.4% decrease in the proportion of visitors to this page clicking ‘show later dates’.  
+
+These findings help validate our hypothesis that expanding the number of dates shown on the page would allow users to more easily find an appointment that suits their schedule without having to click through multiple pages. 

app/book-a-vaccination/2025/10/improving-date-selection/choose-date-old.png

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+---
+title: "What we learnt about how pharmacies approach vaccination bookings"
+date: 2025-10-02
+---
+
+We recently visited 10 pharmacies in London to see how they were using Manage Your Appointments, just as appointment booking for this year’s seasonal vaccinations opened. 
+
+We did this research for two main reasons: 
+
+1. To help us better understand the feedback we were receiving: we’ve been getting lots of feedback through our survey, in the Q&A during training webinars and via the service desk. This feedback is great for learning what users want and where they’re running into problems, but usually it’s missing the detail required to fully understand the underlying need. 
+
+2. To hear from users unlikely to take part in remote research: up to this point most of the research on MYA has been remote. This means the sample has skewed towards the kind of users who can easily join a pre-scheduled Teams call. As a result, we’ve heard from lots of back office staff for large pharmacy chains, and people in admin roles for Trusts and primary care networks (PCNs). But, we haven’t heard from as many pharmacists or dispensers as we should have, especially given pharmacies account for roughly 95% of MYA’s users.  
+
+## Different approaches to running seasonal vaccinations
+This research helped us get a clearer picture of how pharmacies run their seasonal vaccination services and how, in turn, they set up appointment availability in MYA. Broadly, the pharmacies we visited took one of two approaches. 
+
+### A flexible approach 
+The most common approach pharmacies took was to allow bookings at any time and set up their appointment availability to mirror their opening hours. That meant going into MYA, creating a weekly repeating session for Monday – Friday, adding all the vaccination services they offer, and then setting the start and finish times to match opening hours. More often than not the start and end dates for this covered the whole campaign. Here's how this set up looks once a user reaches the 'Check your answers' screen:
+
+![Screenshot of a MYA webpage with the title 'Check weekly session' with the details: 1 October to 23 December 2025, Monday to Friday, 09:30 to 17:30, one vaccinator, 5-minute appointments, COVID and flu vaccinations, 96 total appointments in the session and a save session button at bottom.](MYA-check-answers.png)
+
+Pharmacies taking this approach typically had lower demand for both seasonal vaccination appointments and other pharmacy services. They also had more capacity, with two pharmacists on site at any time, or at the very least two trained vaccinators. This gave them the breathing room to offer seasonal vaccinations all day, while still being able to take breaks and stay on top of everything else. 
+
+It also meant they had a relaxed attitude to walk-ins and patients ringing to book an appointment, which they would often just note down in a paper diary. As one pharmacist put it:
+> it’s not manage your appointments, it’s go with the flow. 
+
+### Less room for manoeuvre 
+At the other end of the spectrum there was a smaller group of pharmacies who found it more difficult to juggle seasonal vaccinations alongside everything else.  These pharmacies typically had a single pharmacist on site, coupled with high demand for other services, like dispensing. This meant they were more worried about falling behind, or becoming overwhelmed, and they were trying to set up MYA in a way that kept things manageable.  
+
+Across these sites I saw 3 approaches to this: 
+1. Limiting appointments to a smaller portion of the day, for example from 11 – 3 instead of 9.30 - 6.
+2. Increasing the appointment length until they got to what felt like a manageable volume of appointments throughout the day, for example setting 15 minute appointments so they had a maximum of 4 an hour.
+3. Blocking out time for seasonal vaccinations in the calendar they use for all other bookable services, and then creating specific appointment availability in MYA to fit with that. This meant they avoided the consultation space being double booked. 
+
+These approaches worked okay, but still felt like ‘workarounds’ with trade-offs in either appointment availability (approaches 1 and 2) or maintenance overheads (approach 3). One approach some of these pharmacies asked about was setting a maximum number of vaccination appointments that could be booked each day. That way, the appointment slots could match their real opening hours and the actual time it took to do the vaccination, without the risk of the entire day getting booked up with vaccinations leaving no time for anything else. 
+
+## Assumptions challenged
+In addition to helping us understand how pharmacies run their services, this research challenged a few unspoken assumptions I think we’d been making.  
+
+### 1. Professionals are more confident with technology 
+We assumed that because our users are professionals, with higher level qualifications, they’ll be “tech savvy” and comfortable with more technical language than we might include in a public facing service. In reality, that wasn’t the case. In general, as long as the task was straightforward they were okay, but when things got a little more tricky it caused problems. For example, many pharmacies really struggled to track down the service welcome email using their inbox search. 
+
+### 2. They'll read guidance or attend training first 
+We’d assumed staff would attend training or read guidance before using the service. We also thought they’d approach creating availability carefully and methodically, with a mindset more like doing a tax return, than doing online shopping. 
+
+In reality pharmacy staff simply don’t have the time for guidance or training beforehand, or to carefully double check everything. Plus, finding time without distractions to do an admin task like this is hard. That means when they get to it, the aim is simply to get their appointment availability set up as quickly as possible, and before they get interrupted by something else. 
+
+### 3. Pharmacies run services to the minute 
+We assumed pharmacies deliver most vaccinations at pre-booked time slots, sticking closely to scheduled appointments. At the pharmacies we visited in this research, we found walk-ins were equally likely, if not more common. My impression was that pharmacies are less concerned with strict timings and more focused on providing a good service overall. If someone turns up early, they may be seen early; if they’re late, it’s usually not a problem. 
+
+When you take a step back, none of this is especially surprising. But, without regular research with end users, it’s easy to slip back into self-referential design and start making these kinds of assumptions. 
+

app/book-a-vaccination/2025/10/improving-date-selection/date-ideation.png

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 ---
 title: "Goodbyes are hard. So we made it easy."
-description: "Allowing NHS regions deactivate organisations."
+description: "Allowing NHS regions to deactivate organisations."
 date: 2025-09-29
 ---