Clinical guidance was changing daily. NHS staff needed one reliable place to find it, and the project to build that place was running on a pre-pandemic timetable.
The NHS is the UK's publicly funded healthcare system, providing comprehensive medical care that is free at the point of delivery. As one of the largest employers in the world, it relies on a workforce of over 1.4 million people to deliver everything from everyday GP services to emergency hospital care.
faster to launch
week to testable prototypes
GDS compliant
At the height of Covid, treatment guidance was being revised faster than anyone could distribute it. The Learning Hub was meant to solve that eventually. It suddenly needed to exist immediately.
We joined the team, built testable prototypes inside a week, and the Hub launched five times faster than planned.
The Learning Hub was a sensible long-term project. Build a central place for NHS staff to find training and clinical resources, properly, over a reasonable timeframe.
Then the timeframe disappeared. Guidance that used to change quarterly was changing daily, and a frontline nurse needed today’s version, not a well-designed one next year.
Clinical guidelines were changing daily and staff had no central, trusted access point
Staff had no single trusted source and were finding things wherever they could
Internal design capability was limited and teams were already stretched
The project's timetable no longer bore any relation to the need
Testable prototypes existed within a week. The Hub launched five times faster than the original plan.
Everything was GDS compliant, accessible and responsive from the start, which is the part that usually gets dropped when a deadline collapses.
The team also came out of it working differently. Ways of working, toolkits and user-centred methods that outlasted the crisis, plus a roadmap built on evidence from real users.
A working, tested prototype for finding and using Covid-19 resources on desktop and mobile
Design choices validated with staff working under pressure, not assumed
Design maturity built into the NHS team through new ways of working, toolkits, and user-centred methods
A product roadmap developed for how the Learning Hub could evolve beyond Covid-19
01
Worked in close partnership with NHS stakeholders to align design choices with user needs under pressure
02
Rapid discovery, framing and prototyping, with something testable inside the first week.
03
GDS compliant, accessible and fully responsive throughout, at a pace that usually costs all three.
04
Toolkits, ways of working and user-centred methods that stayed with the team after we'd gone.
Thunk totally transformed our product and our design process at a critical time for the project. Speed and quality were at the very highest level. Plus they’re also great fun to work with.
Rob Lenihan, Head of Design, NHS
A disciplined hunt for value — the structure to explore the unknown without the usual cost of getting it wrong.
1-hour (remote)
Bring us the thing everyone in your organisation disagrees about. We'll tell you what we'd do, whether that involves us or not.
1-day (in person)
One day won't solve everything, but it'll tell you exactly where to start. 'Too many ideas' become one clear plan with the evidence to back it.