Review the whole patient journey before approving a redesign

What this means for your practice

Agree acceptance around complete visitor tasks and the result the receiving team needs. Include connected services, narrow screens and recovery from mistakes rather than reviewing screenshots alone.

A practical example

For example, a fictional enquiry should reach the correct team with the details needed to reply, while the visitor sees an accurate confirmation. Ask to try it on a phone and include a simple mistake, such as leaving a required field blank. Record anything that prevents completion and agree who resolves it. The website is ready when the agreed journeys work, not merely when every page has been shown in a presentation.

Assign a practice colleague to each important task so somebody can confirm the real outcome. The supplier can demonstrate that a message was sent, but reception needs to confirm it arrived in a usable form. Shared review makes it harder for a gap between systems to be overlooked.

Make this improvement work

Choose acceptance tasks before the redesign is visually complete. A visitor might arrive from search, identify a relevant service, send a fictional enquiry and receive an accurate confirmation. The receiving team should then be able to locate that enquiry through authorised testing. Include a narrow screen, an external destination and an ordinary mistake that needs correction. Ask the supplier to demonstrate the complete sequence rather than offer separate screenshots of attractive pages. Record unresolved limitations with owners. A design can look finished while the most important handover remains broken, so the launch decision should use evidence from the working journey.

How to check the result

Track acceptance tasks blocked by unresolved defects.