The NHS Website: A redesign
I gave myself one hour to redesign the NHS Jobs landing page
This week, I set myself a little design challenge — spend one hour redesigning the NHS Jobs landing page.
The current page
Let’s talk about what isn’t working here. The first thing that jumps out is how busy the page feels. The layout feels clunky and there are no less than 24 blue-underlined links visible above the fold. Much of the de facto standard Arial font is a very small 12px and I’m not sure how complimentary the maroon headers are with the ‘NHS blue’ but this may be personal preference (enter user testing). In summary, the page feels cluttered, dated, and a little overwhelming.
The redesign
The first thing you might notice is that I have left in the very bright Covid-19 banner at the top. I know this arguably detracts from a smooth user experience, but it is obviously an important message in the middle of a crisis — in which the NHS is on the front line — so I felt it warranted this level of attention grabbing.
Moving onto my design choices, I started by removing a lot of content. Most of it, in fact. My thinking here — aside from creating some much needed white space and reducing the volume of copy — was that the most likely reason for someone visiting the NHS Jobs website is… to find an NHS job. This would have to be validated through user testing of course, but if someone wants other services (career advice, latest news) then they can still access these easily from the refreshed top navigation bar. The minimal content of this new design avoids bombarding users with everything all at once.
I have kept the colour palette simple and in-line with the recognisable NHS-blue. I chose fonts that are easy on the eye and I haven’t gone below 16px. I also designed with mobile in mind — there are logical break points in this layout that will allow for easy navigation on a mobile phone (something I felt was lacking in the existing design).
I increased the prominence of the job search CTA and I chose to pull through saved roles and previous applications underneath the job search section, both of which I felt were useful to have immediately to hand when job hunting.
There is a lot more I could do with this design, but within the hour that I set myself, I hope I’ve created a cleaner, less cluttered landing page that would be intuitive to use — both on mobile and web.
