Catalan COVID Vaccine App

Year

2021


Service

UX research
UX design


Roles

Irene Pereyra - Creative director
Mayra Sanchez - UX design, UX research
Ciaran Kelly - UX design, UX research
Giorgi Zhuzhiashvili - UX design, UI design

An intuitive concept app for Catalan citizens to schedule COVID vaccines and access information

Vaccines where authorized and the pandemic was coming to an end! For this project, our brief was to design a concept app for the Catalan government where people could register to obtain their vaccine, focusing in +65 year old people, and where they could have their final QR code for traveling.

Our solution was an app based on the premise “Spread the Vaccine, not the virus”, tackling the social connection and the idea that we all could contribute to stop this pandemic.

THE RESEARCH

Where do we fit?

First, let’s understand where our app will fit in the Catalan Government ecosystem. We analized the digital services for different sectors (education, social, economy, transport, etc.), focusing on the health sector, of course. We deep dived into understanding the existing channels specially those created during the COVID pandemic.

We created a visual ecosystem of the health services dividing them in three processes: get information, take action and track status. All the platforms are categorized depending on their purpose while some of them served multiple. We concluded our app will be part of the three sections where they could get information, register and get their QR codes, and keep track of their vaccination process.

Catalunya Government ecosystem

Learning from other countries

By the time we were working in this app, some countries were starting to vaccinate their first group: health professionals and people living in nursing homes. Each country had their own approach. So, competitive analysis was more of an inspiration search, looking at what they were doing, how they were handling this process, what we could learn and add to our app, and what we could improve. We learned a lot from them and features as simple as sharing the app became a main part of our final proposal.

logo COVID app Israel

Israel

logo COVID app Argentina

Argentina

logo COVID app Ireland

Ireland

logo COVID app NHS-UK

UK

logo COVID app China

China

logo COVID app China

Israel app

logo COVID app China

Argentina app

Our main target

We conducted several interviews between different groups of people including doctors and common citizens to understand their needs and possible limitations. All these people and interviews informed our creation of 4 personas: health workers, +65-year-old people, their sons and daughters, and people in doubt of the vaccine.

During this process we learned that our focus group either felt confident enough to do the registration themselves or they could have direct help from someone else to do it for them. So, an important process was to make it easy for their sons and daughters to be able to register their parents for their vaccine.

Overloaded Olivia

Job

Runs Coffee Shop

Age

33

Vaccinated Victor

Job

Doctor

Age

35

Doubtful Dolores

Job

Retired teacher

Age

67

Retired Ricardo-persona profile 1

IDEATION

The idea behind the concept

We know what our users will need and what to avoid. Now we needed to ideate how to provide it. We based our app around the statement “Spread the vaccine, not de virus”. Our inspiration came from the visuals many communication channels used at the beginning of the pandemic to illustrate how the virus was spreading across the globe, as well as the need of social connections, increased during the pandemic. This guided the visual design and the design of many of the app's features.

Spread the vaccine,
not the virus

Keep people engaged

We wanted to replicate how the virus spreaded around the population. But this time, we would spread the vaccine by creating a network which will help people engage and create a sense of community, all together we can stop the virus. There are three ways to create and grow your network:

Registering someone else
If you register yourself or someone, those become the first persons in your network.

Sharing the app
If you share the app with someone, the network of that person and yours connect.

Proximity detection
When walking down the street, maybe to buy groceries, the app will detect anyone who also had the app and connect their networks.

In the end, we would have one single network all connected with the same purpose: Spread the vaccine, not the virus.

Register someone else

Sharing the app

Proximity detection

Ideal flows are not always real

This phase of the design was one of the most challenging with all the different actions and possibilities. Infinite loops made themselves present of course and flows with death ends were an inspiring challenge. On the right, you can see the legend system we used for our user flows. Below you’ll find a simple user flow for growing the network in the app and a more fun and complicated one for how the user would go from registering to getting their final QR code.

legend

Legend system for userflows

User flow - network growth

Growing network userflow

User flow - get vaccinate

Userflow for all the process
from registering in the app to getting the final QR code

THE DESIGN

The idea behind the concept

Fast forward we finally jump on design. We created different level of fidelity wireframes, from sketches to high fidelity and notations of the different pages needed. We had special focus on the pages that would be needed for the registration and vaccination process, included an onboarding process that explained the use of the app, how to grow your network and where to follow the Catalunya vaccination status.

Barcelona being Catalunya’s capital and an international city, it all had to start with language selection:

onboarding1
onboarding2 onboarding3 home screen appointment process appointment process: pre-existing health conditions scan your id personal information form confirm appointment select appointment's date and place appointment information vaccination QR code report a side effect Vacnet network

THE TAKEAWAYS

The whole project was developed in nine intense weeks in which I learned a lot about the whole process of both designing an app, the job of a UX designer and some ealry insights in terms of UI. Learning how to structure an interview and asking the right questions, how many iterations of one page could be done, understanding which was the best user flow and how to arrange the app in terms of it. I found amazing and challenging having to design an app which, if real, could help to solve a current problem which I believe helped us to keep engaged. As an overall project I had a lot of fun with my teammates, for all of us it was the very first time ever going through this process, so it was full of learning.

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