About this project

Design thinking

Up to March, according to New York Times, about a third of the U.S. population has taken at least one dose of COVID vaccine. More states are expanding their vaccination policies to other age groups as time moves on to meet Biden's vaccination goal of “200 million in his first 100 days in office.” The Biden administration said this week that it will leave it to the private sector to create a mobile digital vaccination passports app for safer and easier access, and New York is actually launching the nation’s first vaccination passport app called “Excelsior Pass” which small businesses, venues and entertainment will be able to start to use it from April 2, 2021.

Presenting one’s health documentation is like presenting one’s story of how safe and healthy people are. It is a prove of how safe someone is, and also a shout-out of someone’s awareness of public health and safety. This is a narrative that is extremely important during this given time, and the information presented should be easy accessible and visually readable for both the users and stakeholders who are checking this documentation.

As a designer, I think it would be super useful if people can present their vaccination records and COVID testing results when they are needed without carrying a bunch of flimsy papers. QR codes that record all the health information can be super easily accessed in a touchless and safe way. At the same time, users should be able to understand different requirements and restrictions for different kinds of commuting, travels, or trips so they can take the required tests and prepare the documents ahead of time. My app features on:

• Generating QR codes for some most commonly-used health documentations (eg. COVID-19 vaccination record card, COVID RNA test results, COVID antibody test results), as well as important ID documents (passport, Driver's license, identification card, etc)

• Serving as an information hub for checking policies for different kinds of trips include:

  • International or domestic flights, trains, subways, etc.

  • Small venue gathering (cinema, bars, restaurants, museums, etc)

• A health daily checker system to self assess if the users are “COVID-free” when they feel unwell

An app with all these functions can make people's lives easier without carrying or forgetting to carry healthy documentation, and also maintain the public safer by reducing the physical interactions between people in order to keep safe and secure.

Design rationales

Mayer's Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (CTML)

The design of this project follows a number of Mayer’s CTML design principles and visual design principles in order to create a clean and effective design to reduce the extraneous load and maximize germane load when users are using the app. Here is a list of CTML principles I used for this prototype:

• Coherence Principle → Balance

• Spatial Contiguity Principle → Visual hierarchy

• The Image Principle → Simple illustrations made of lines, shapes and points

• Signaling Principle → Scale and color contrast

Color theories and visual design

For this project, I chose to use analogous color schemes use adjacent colors from the color wheel, which fits the theme of “travel” and “health”, creating a sense of pleasing, calming, informative, and security. The analogous colors usually have one dominant color, and a secondary color that supports it and the accent color is served to highlight the different information. In action-orientated tasks and designs, analogous color schemes are not only pleasing to the eye, but can effectively instruct the consumer where and how to take action.

Limitations and future work

Due to the time constraints, I did not have time to conduct proper user research on users’ needs for health passes - all the functions are built upon my own assumptions and health requirements that are on the news. I also did not have time to conduct a usability test on the application. This project is clearly not built from a proper UX perspective but more from a visual design perspective. If I have time, I would like to start by using the double diamond iterative design model from the analysis phase to research, then to the design phase and iterate the whole process in order to build a user-centered app.