Design principles
These design principles guide decision making and help ensure services meet the needs of the people who use them.
Use them throughout the design process, from understanding needs and exploring ideas to building, testing and improving services. Together, they help us create services that are accessible, inclusive, safe and effective.
The principles work together and should be considered together when making design and delivery decisions.
Start with user needs
- Test your assumptions
- Public services are for everyone and must be driven by user needs
- User research prevents wasted resources and reveals real problems, enabling evidence-based, cost-effective decisions
Design with data
- Use data to make decisions
- Continuously monitor service performance and use data and user feedback to prioritise improvements and identify problems that need to be fixed
Understand context
Understand users and their needs in the context of health and care
Design services in Welsh and English
- Design and build services that promote and ease the use of Welsh
- Treat those who speak Welsh equally with those who speak English
Make it simple and inclusive
- Make the service easy to use and make sure everyone can use it
- Design inclusively, ensuring easy access for all, including those often excluded
- Healthcare can be complex; do the hard work to make it simpler
Design for trust and safety
- Digital information, tools and services have the potential to cause patient harm
- Services must be secure to maintain users' trust
- Respect and protect users' confidentiality and privacy
Deliver with transparency and consistency
Use and contribute to open standards, common components and patterns and share what you’re doing whenever you can.
Iterate, learn and improve
- Rapidly iterate and focus on the improvements that have the most value, based on user feedback.
- Use an incremental, fast-paced approach to get working products into users' hands as early as possible, as often as possible.
Minimise environmental impact
The climate crisis is a health crisis. Follow sustainability best practice to reduce the environmental impact of your service across its lifespan.