Roadmap – Delivery Lifecycle

The diagram below illustrates the design and development process that is used to create Design Guidance and Toolkit controls for the Microsoft Health Common User Interface (CUI).

The Microsoft Health CUI Design Guidance has been developed through a rigorous, iterative design process which involved clinicians and other healthcare professionals, experts in human-computer interaction, usability and user interface design throughout the entire process. Once a topic area has been broadly researched and understood during the Envisioning phase, it enters the detailed Planning and Design phase. As the user interface design evolves during this phase, input and feedback are regularly sought from clinicians and other potential end users, through a variety of structured research and usability testing techniques.

Throughout the iterative design process, draft user interface designs are reviewed through patient safety assessments by clinicians and informatics experts within the UK NHS. The internal standards body for the NHS, the Information Standards Board for Health and Social Care (ISB), is also involved in reviewing elements of the Design Guidance and its supporting rationale, to ensure it has sound justification and sufficient rigour to enable it to become a standard across all NHS IT systems.

Once the user interface designs have been usability-tested with clinicians and approved by the relevant review panels within the NHS, the development of detailed Design Guidance commences. Early versions of the Design Guidance and the Toolkit controls derived from this are known as Community Technology Previews (CTPs) and are released to Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who are part of the NHS Connecting for Health programme. The ISVs provide the team with feedback on the designs and controls including, for example, the feasibility of incorporating them into the clinical applications.