As we go into the second year of the pandemic, it's clear that people have and will continue to go out, out of necessity for work and/or a refuge from isolation among other reasons. We want to help people stay safe and healthy as they go out in the pandemic.
Teammates: Chufan Huang, Cynthia Zhou
Class: HCDE 518 Interaction Design, Autumn 2020
Problem Statement
How can we inform and alert people about the COVID-19 risk in their geographic area while respecting their privacy and not overwhelming them with information?
Final Solution
Research
STAKEHOLDERS
Primary
People in the United States who go outside and want to be informed about relevant COVID-19 risks in the local area(s) they visit.
Tertiary
Organizations that collect and publicize COVID-19 data such as the WHO and the CDC.
Key findings:
- Most people go outside at least twice a week and for at least one hour
- Most people are also somewhat familiar with COVID-19 and its regulations
- Most people are somewhat interested in receiving COVID-19 related news and notifications
- Most people are either comfortable or indifferent with their location being used for health related reasons
“I’m uncomfortable in grocery stores as some shoppers do not respect the six feet distancing policy.”
“I feel alarmed when I’m outside. Just not happy and not fully enjoying the outside world.”
“I’m more concerned with people in a closed location such as a grocery store than in an open location such as a hiking trail.”
Design Requirements
- Should alert users in the United States if they’ve recently been in areas with other people who have tested positive in a way that doesn’t overwhelm or cause people to become desensitized to the alerts.
- Should provide the latest information about COVID-19 rates close to them.
- Should provide information about the density of people in a certain area.
- Should allow users to anonymously self report infection and/or symptoms for their own tracking purposes as well as to help the greater community be informed about their risk.
- Should allow users to supply location information while clearly signaling to them that their information will not be compromised, will be kept private and confidential, and only used to help others in their community understand their overall risk.
- Should give users choice of when their location is shared and the level of granularity at which location is pinpointed (e.g., zip code rather than exact address).
- Should provide users information on nearest testing centers.
Personas
Ideation
While we did explore physical displays at locations such as grocery stores and augmented reality with wearable tech as other possible solutions, we decided to go with a mobile app because it is the easiest way to immediately notify users and alert them to relevant updates. No additional equipment is required of the user either, besides the smartphone most people in our stakeholders groups have nowadays.
Sketches
By teammate Chufan Huang
Task List
After choosing the design idea of the mobile app from the sketches, we created this task list to guide our wire-framing, user flow diagramming, and the creation of our information architecture.
Task 1: Exposures found and notified.
Task 2: Self report.
Task 3: Find our exposure risk before going somewhere.
Information Architecture
User Flow Diagrams
Wireframes
Usability Testing
We made our first iteration of wireframes with medium fidelity on Figma so that we could run some usability tests on them. This study had 6 participants over Zoom. We asked them to share their screen, sent them a link to our Figma prototype, and asked them to talk out look as we gave them each task and probed with follow up questions.
Key Findings
Changes to Prototype
