Vaccine Ontario

A suite of applications helping Ontarians manage their COVID-19 vaccinations.

The early days of the pandemic in Ontario were filled with confusion and frustration, as residents struggled to find vaccination sites and book appointments to receive their first dose. Even later on, the process of acquiring and presenting proof of vaccination remained unintuitive and difficult, until the practice was dropped altogether.

Could using Human-Centred Design have provided a better way?

Created for course project. Not developed by or associated with the Government of Ontario. Any similarity to Government of Ontario digital assets is for simulation purposes only.

About the project

Summary

I ideated and designed a pair of high-quality prototypes, one for smartphone and one for smartwatch, to help Ontarians book and manage appointments for COVID-19 vaccines.

Features include on-the-go reminders for upcoming appointments, and an easy way to view and present vaccination history.

Sector

Government and public health

Platforms

  • Android mobile
  • Wear OS for smartwatch

My role

  • Created user persona profile
  • Prototyped low- and high-fidelity designs
  • Conducted usability testing
  • Designed animations and view transitions

Tools used

  • Figma
  • Google Drive
  • Kanban task management

Skills learned

  • Human-Centred Design for wearables and small screens
  • End-to-end interaction flow design
  • Creating reusable and composable Figma components
  • Styleguide document creation

Who is this for?

A user persona is a crucial element of Human-Centred Design: by envisioning who you're designing for, you gain a more holistic understanding of what features are more or less essential to helping your users achieve their goals.

This exercise led to a surprising lesson: design is time-sensitive. March 2022 saw the end of many pandemic-related restrictions of Ontario, which forced me to examine how an application to help Ontarians receive and prove vaccinations could still be helpful.

On-the-Go Omar

  • 26 years old
  • Lives alone in a downtown Toronto studio apartment
  • Heavily reliant on technology to remind him of different responsibilities
  • Wants to protect himself and others from COVID, but can't take too much time away from work
  • Reliant on public transit to get around: uses commute time to organize upcoming tasks

From this, I determined that Omar needs:

  1. A way to book vaccine appointments at accessible locations.
  2. A way to monitor his appointments so he doesn't double-book himself.
  3. To get consistent reminders about his upcoming appointments.

prototyping

I've always struggled to draw on paper, especially when precision is an asset. For low-fidelity prototyping of screens for both platforms, I used a stylus to draw directly in Figma using the Pencil tool. This allowed me to combine the flexibility and speed of hand-drawing with the convenience of undo, redo, and copying shared components.

Although I had some previous experience designing for Android mobile phones, smartwatches were a completely new realm. I relied heavily on official Wear OS style guides to determine what components were available to me.

the finished product

Seven workflows, dozens of component states, and weeks of hard work later, I created a working prototype that I'm proud to present. Both applications come with their own style guide, which was adapted by intertwining different flavours of Material Design with the official Government of Ontario style manual for web and mobile.

Try them below! To view in fullscreen, click on a prototype and press F.