Intro

Upon being approached by a Head Hunter for a possible job in Refinitiv, I was assigned a project to evaluate my skills for a Senior UX Position. This was part of several round of interviews where I finally had the opportunity to present my project.
I normally don’t include design challenges among my works, but given the topic I wanted to make an exception, after all COVID-19 impacted almost every IT sector and good UX played a central role in efficient case tracking in Asia.
The following project took me 3 days to complete.

Challenge Context

Singapore govt are building a digital tool to help the contact tracing team identify who to contact in the event of new cases, and track the overall occurrence of cases across Singapore. 
They want to look at how to help the tracing team be as efficient as possible in their tracing efforts and improve insights into the occurrence of the virus. 
They will look to develop this solution using the data from the contact tracing app. 

The Ask

1- What are some of the key user needs?
2- What are the key requirements of the product?
3- Showcase your design solution.
You can use sketches, user flows, wireframes as you wish.
Please include at least 1 high fidelity visual design/page mockup.
4- How you would go about testing / validating your solution?

My Process

In order to work fast, I choose to use the OOUX (object oriented UX) framework to start mapping a basic information architecture, identifying the main objects and get an idea about how complex the solution might be.
To do that I look at nouns and action verbs within the challenge statement. It’s about looking for recurring words and pay attentions to hint about data mentions.

After a quick internet search, I managed to find a description of the current tracing process used by the team, which can be found here. For the sake of reference, I displayed the process flow below

There are 2 areas where I think that technology and improved UX might help significantly the whole process: the identification of close contacts and the overlaps of venues where new cases were recorded.

Given that this is partially a manual process (phone calls, interviews etc), perhaps the prioritization of who to call first could help, also considering that an algorithm could easily flag the possible close contacts first leveraging on all the data collected by the trace together app and/or the token.

At this point, using what I previously identified on the challenge statement plus, adding what I learnt form the current process and a look at the trace together app, I can go back to my OOUX framework and draft a first iteration of the Information Architecture of the solution.

The whole goal of using the OOUX framework is to build redundacy among the objects in order to keep a shallow IA and facilitate interaction between the objects. Now I feel confident in saying that the main flows of this solution should focus on:
– Identifying the close contacts as quickly as possible for a faster quarantine placement (if necessary) and contact people with symptoms.
– Identifying those venues that shows a record of positive cases above a certain threshold and flag them to MOH for disinfection, closure etc…
To validate the work done so far I’d proceed with interviewing some of the contact tracing officers to find out about the possible limitations of the current system and if the areas of improvements that I identified are valid.
Although I already have some of the answers (from the article quoted previously) I’d still proceed with the script on the below. Even better would be to do some contextual enquiries and visit the team, observing while they work and take notes, giving the current situation (social distancing is in place almost everywhere), some phone calls sound more feasible.

Validation with User Interviews Script

1. How long have you been working in the team?
2. What are most common tasks do you perform while tracing the contacts?
3. How do you normally approach the identification of the contacts?
4. What are the most important data pieces that makes you decide who to call first?
5. How long does it usually take for each call?
6. What does the contacts record system (if any) looks like? How does it work?
7. Could you describe your routine at work?
8. What are the pain points, or frictions you are facing at the moment?
9. Is there any part of the process that you think could be automated? Which one?
10. What was your worst experience using the current system? Can you share with me a specific scenario?
11. Have you ever felt “stuck” while performing these tasks? What happened?
12. If you had a magic wand, what would you do to make the current solution better for you? 

Before proceeding having a look at the wireframes its important to review key user needs and solution requirements:

Finally I put together 3 essential, mid-fidelity wireframes to showcase my solution.

A table with all the positive confirmed cases for the tracing officer to review and inspect individual cases.

A dashboard page for each individual case that displays the possible exposures to other individuals, based on the duration detected by the trace together-app and proximity space. Here the officer can clearly identify the most critical people to call first and inquire about symptoms.

A couple of modal screens that aids the officer during the calls, allowing to quickly record the places visited and the presence of symptoms, if any. This interaction will basically close the loop by updating the venues with the number of cases and list of people involved. In addition, the venues list where new cases were detected is also updated.

Overall, the project was very well received at Refinitiv, and, in the end, I got the job!