Design Challenge - Digital Record of Immunization

Roles

Sole Designer - Research, Wireframing, Prototype

Duration

1 week - Jul 2022 - Jul 2022

Overview

If you've ever received a vaccination in the province of Ontario, you've might have seen those yellow vaccination booklets (and have probably lost it) and currently, despite this digital age we live in, it's surprisingly convoluted to find your vaccination history if and when you need it and it seems like there's no one place that has this information for you to view. The easiest way I've found, going off the information the Public Health Ontario Immunization page is to contact your local public health unit directly. So, as a design challenge, I've decided to design a system that allows residents to accurately track their immunization records digitally.

Secondary Research

I looked at various forms of tracking vaccinations across physical and digital means

Yellow Card

  • The standard method of tracking vaccinations in the province of Ontario

  • Allows parents to track which major vaccinations their child needs at a various stages in their life

  • Easy to lose

  • Record keeping is ultimately up to the parent and may be prone to errors

CANImmunize

  • Can track vaccinations for your family

  • No longer needed to carry around yellow book

  • Reminders when it’s time to get vaccinated

  • Get facts about vaccinations in province of territory

  • Receive alerts about disease outbreaks in the area

  • Multiplatform (iOS, Android, Mc, Windows

Design

Based on similar features from other systems, I decided to design and implement the following in my designs

  • Adding/Managing Vaccination Records for multiple individuals

  • Adding a notification system that reminds the user when the next vaccination will be (if applicable)

  • Downloading/Sharing a full list of vaccination for sharing with various healthcare providers

  • A feature that allows users to find the nearest clinic

  • A medical dictionary, where users can find more information on various vaccinations, diseases, and medical terminology

One feature that I thought was useful to include, and found wasn't included in other similar implementations, is a medical dictionary, where users can find more information on various vaccinations, diseases, and medical terminology. One thing I aim to convey through this is project is transparency in information. For the average person, the fields of science and medicine can seem complicated and daunting, and by implementing a way for users to gain information straight from the app I hope to bring down that barrier.

Wireframes

While this digital record of immunization will eventually be designed for a wide variety of screen sizes, I first decided to focus on designing for mobile applications and scaling up from there. This is the form factor I would expect the vast majority of users to use this system in, for example accessing in the doctors office for easy sharing, or adding a new record while being monitored after receiving a new vaccination.

When designing for a desktop environment, to take advantage of the larger screen size I decided to have a persistent sidebar at the edge of the screen where users can easily switch between records. I spaced out the information in each vaccination record and grouped them under their own separate heading, which I believe allows the user to easily parse through information and provides a cleaner look. In addition, I added an edit icon for each vaccination record to provide a visual indicator for that functionality and to compensate for the lack of touch functionality on some desktop environments. Meanwhile tablet environments would be somewhere between desktop and mobile, and have a mix of elements from both

High Fidelity Mockups

My goal when moving to high fidelity mockups was both to bring all the elements in the wireframes to a consistent design language, and to convey information without making it overbearing for the end user. One idea I had for this, is to show vaccination status through colours and icons.

Finalized designs for the mobile app

Finalized designs for the desktop environment

Conclusion

Due to the quick turnaround time, one of the biggest limitations to this design challenge is the lack of data from a usability study. Not having that real world user data means there is no information about pain points or critical flaws with my current designs as I iterate on them from the wireframing process to prototyping and is something I would aim to complete if I were to tackle this project again in the future.

Another constraint to this design challenge is that, while it may be a nice to have in the interim, it doesn't truly solve the problem of automatically managing vaccination records, and is ultimately still reliant on the end user to add and track their own vaccinations. Ideally, I would like to see a project similar to this be produced by a collaborative effort from the Ontario Government, Public Health Ontario, and the various regional public health agencies, allowing citizens vaccination records to be recorded and monitored, all without putting private health information in the hands of a third party.

Overall, this design challenge has been a huge learning experience for me and is something I would love to come back to and as a concept, as well as something I'd like to see become more widely adopted