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

Summary

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.}

My role

Using Human-Centred Design (HCD) methodology, I ideated on the application designs through low- and high-fidelity phases in Figma. I verified my decisions through live usability testing, before wiring the finished designs into interactive prototypes.

Goals

Who is this for?

In keeping with HCD, I created a user persona profile, On-the-Go Omar, to help inform an empathetic approach to my designs. Creating this persona proved a challenge in context: when the project was taking place in March 2022, many of the major pandemic-related restrictions in Ontario had been lifted or lessened, and most Ontarians who wanted vaccines likely had them already. So, what kind of user would benefit from such an application?

Ultimately, I focused Omar's user sector to "high-effect latecomers": people whose situation prevented them from being involved with early re-integration efforts after the first wave of vaccines, i.e., at the height of relevance for vaccine 'passports', but who were still positively inclined to get vaccinated.

Guiding principles

Although my personal experience with the COVID-19 pandemic was certain to colour my work in some way, I tried to be deliberate about how and where. In particular, I focused on the "high-effect" aspects of booking my own appointments. I can distinctly recall the mental fatigue I felt at the height of the early vaccine rush at words like "dose", "availability", "queue"... So, I wanted to make these applications as inobtrusive as possible, offering the required functionality while minimizing time and mental effort to use.

As for the aesthetics of the applications, I opted to design for Android devices, leaning in particular on extant style guides to take as much of the decision-making process as possible out of my hands. Google's Material Design and Wear OS styleguides are extensive and usually offer one (and only one) meaningful idiom for any given use case.

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.

Results

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.