I took a service design class as the Coronavirus pandemic was taking off in the United States (Spring 2020). At the time, testing services were not firmly in place and the U.S. wasn't testing at a high enough rate to get a handle on the pandemic.
Our goal was to design a service that could deliver, collect, process, and deliver results of COVID-19 tests quickly to help lower the risk of spreading disease (and get a good grade doing it).
Discover
We studied the Covid-19 pandemic using secondary sources and interviews with subject matter experts. I spent most of my time during this process interviewing subject matter experts and potential users to better understand the problem space.
Research Wall
Our research gave us a better understanding of the issues facing those fighting the pandemic. We created a research wall with all the insight's we'd collected and created an Affinity Diagram to group them into themes.
Define
We pulled out key insights from each theme and prioritized them by problems that we had time to solve during the semester. We also had to make certain assumptions or get rid of some problems altogether, since society was still learning a lot about Covid-19 during this time and many answers to questions remained outside of our reach.
What we learned was that COVID-19 testing was not happening on a large enough scale in the U.S. People were denied diagnostic tests and antibody tests were difficult to obtain and not accurate enough. Testing was constrained by lack of personnel, PPE, test kits, and limited lab capacity.
Pivot
We originally wanted to design a service around a user being able to obtain and get results from an at-home Covid-19 testing kit, but there wasn't enough known about how the science would work at the time.
This left a lot of risks and gaps in our plan. Instead of risking these gaps, we decided to focus on the distribution of testing kits in general.
Design
This project focused on the experience design of our service. While we did create a few wireframes, we spent the bulk of the semester creating personas, journey maps, service blueprints, and other research artifacts to design this new experience.
My primary role during this process was building out the journey map and service blueprint, but I contributed to the persona and value flow as well.
