Case Study
Vaxx.nz
Making it easier for 99,000+ people to find COVID-19 vaccinations during the 2020 lockdowns
Role
Designer, FOSS Maintainer
Period
Sep 2021 — Aug 2023
Categories
About
- Vaxx.nz was an open source web app that helped people find COVID vaccinations.
- It sort of blew up in popularity during the 2020 COVID lockdowns in New Zealand.
- Ended up collaborating with the New Zealand Ministry of Health to ship features faster and keep the system stable.
Challenge
- New Zealanders were finding it difficult and frustrating to book their COVID-19 vaccinations and churning as a result.
- Official services made it difficult to search vaccination bookings by date and this resulted in hundreds of additional clicks.
- People were not getting vaccinated because of the friction experienced during the booking process.
Response
- With a group of friends, we reverse engineered and scraped vaccination booking data.
- I then facilitated a design-led process where we co-created a better search experience for users in 48 hours. The public seems to like it.
- We ended up helping 99,000+ people get vaccinated faster by removing friction from the process.
Impact
People helped
User sessions
From idea to launch
Initial steps
A friend's wife complained about how hard it was to book a COVID-19 vaccine online.
A few quick rounds of usability testing and user interviews yielded that it was painful to search for bookings, and that the only bookings she could find were months away. We gathered some mates on Discord as we had just gone into another lockdown in New Zealand, and got to work remotely to maintain social distancing.
Some of our developers split off to do some scoping to see what was feasible with the data. After a few technical discoveries and a little bit of journey mapping we decided on a calendar approach to test with users in response. I opted for the bare minimum wireframing required to explain workflows and concepts and to keep everyone on the same page.
Existing workflow (10–45 minutes):
Search for a vaccination → Click into an individual vaccination site → See available bookings for that site → Go back and click on another site → Repeat 60+ times until you find an appointment the same week → Make a booking
Our redesigned workflow (2 minutes):
Search for a vaccination → One click on the day you want to get vaccinated → Make a booking
Designing in a dev environment
Given that our little project was heavily constrained by dirty data pulled by hackily scraping govt websites, we had to be pragmatic with our design process. There were disgusting regexes, and dirty, dirty hacks everywhere.
It was a painful balancing act in terms of product prioritization; on one hand you have the experience you want to test with the user, and at the other you have to contend with reality and what you can actually ship in a short amount of time. We ditched figma at this point and went straight into the frontend to save time on implementation.
Initial launch
We launched on Twitter, Reddit and LinkedIn and gained a little bit of traffic initially, peaking at over 23,000 unique users in a single day.
As feedback came in over twitter and emails, we had to make sure we were ready to make improvements and scale. We started preparing to open the floodgates to contributors to scale as an open source project over discord and GitHub. To remain focused, I put together a triage workflow using GitHub issues and GitHub kanban boards.
Outcome
We received some press, and maintained a public discord community with about 60 contributors. We shipped several big updates since launching, including internationalization and pulling walk-in venue locations where people can get vaccinated without an appointment.
We ran guerrilla usability testing every so often to test new and existing workflows, and generally caught most of the issues that way. Anything that needed more design or engineering work was logged as an issue on GitHub, and open source contributors picked it up from there.
The site spiked at 20K+ users on a single day when it was in use according to Google Analytics. It helped a lot of people at the time. The service has since served its purpose — the live bookings part of the site was shut down as the pandemic wound down.
