Project Overview

The year 2020 is doomed to be marked in human history by the worldwide outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Among all the mitigation and control measures aiming at the so called “flattening of the curve”, such as enforced lockdowns, home confinement, and social distancing criteria, smartphone-based COVID-19 applications have emerged as one of the most frequently implemented technologies.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has underscored the importance of identifying COVID-19 cases and isolating them before they spread. The unprecedented spread of COVID-19 has the world scrambling to navigate a new normal. Testing and tracing is vital to this effort, and all individuals in contact with an infected individual must be identified to mitigate further spread of the virus.

Mobile application technology offers a powerful solution to facilitate the collection of data about user movements and points of contact. To defeat COVID-19 there must be a robust and effective track and trace app that can reliably provide the data needed to stop the spread. But there are numerous complications of such an undertaking, and they all must be considered throughout the design process. I along with my colleagues were assigned the task to design a contact tracer app for the people of Bangladesh during this emergency.

Corona Tracer BD is based on centralized system model, which describes itself as a “Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing” system.

Corona Tracer BD works by having the health authority run a central server which issues each user a series of TempIDs, each of which is an encrypted token that contains the user’s identity and is good for about 15 minutes. When two devices encounter each other, they exchange TempIDs, so your device gradually accumulates a list of the TempIDs of all the devices you have come into contact with. If you test positive, you upload all those TempIDs to the health authority (your own TempIDs are irrelevant), which then decrypts them and is able to identify all the people that you might have infected and can take appropriate action.

We found that individual differences such as prosocialness, COVID-19 risk perceptions, general privacy concerns, technology readiness, and demographic factors played a more important role than app design choices such as decentralized design vs. centralized design, location use, app providers, and the presentation of security risks.

Our mediation analysis showed that one’s perception of the public health benefits offered by the app and the adoption willingness of other people had a larger effect in explaining the observed effects of app design choices and individual differences than one’s perception of the app’s security and privacy risks.

When talking about an app millions of people will have to trust. It’s not about technology, but about the design people can trust and you can’t trust what you don’t understand. While it’s actually quite simple: the app is a diary. You use it to keep track of all the people you were close to. But instead of writing it down yourself, this diary does all the work for you. It’s fully automatic. It forgets no one, and you don’t even have to know the other people, because it’s completely anonymous.

We ideated some UI concepts after plotting an information architecture. Where we can fit solutions into the platform that can solve users’ problems and create a smooth user experience.

With the product layout mapped out, We then created prototypes and ran some user tests. I focused on atomic design and created small interface building blocks and then put these together to create progressively more complicated interface elements. Atomic design approach helped me to ensure consistency by combining elements at a granular level and then building up from those.

Contact tracing helps protect us, our family, and our community by:

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