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.
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.
From this, I determined that Omar needs:
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.
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.