Locations of Interest

Web tool to assist with New Zealand's COVID-19 response

What I love about Product Design is the chance to create valuable products that make a difference in the lives of others. Sometimes, a project like this all starts off with a form of a strike of inspiration at exactly the right time. This is one of those times.

In August 2021, New Zealand went into its second nationwide lockdown. The team of five million all came together to eliminate the spread of COVID-19 in the community. New Zealanders were keeping a close eye on the Ministry of Health’s locations of interest register, watching for exposure events relevant to them.

But there was a gap in the experience for finding these locations of interest.

The Ministry of Health was maintaining a table with all exposure events, but it was difficult to find relevant locations of interest in the collection of hundreds. There were no filtering or ordering options to sort for particular dates or locations. We could search, but as Wellingtonians we often got tired of sifting through "Mount Wellington" locations.

This was a common complaint I was seeing amongst friends and family and across social media.

When my good friend Mathew Boyles discovered the locations of interest data was available in a GitHub repo maintained and updated by the Ministry of Health, we knew it was time to give back to the community in our own meaningful way.

And so, we built Locations of Interest.

Design

To start providing value to the community as soon as possible, we knew we needed to create this site quickly. We kept the feature set lean to focus on the best possible experience for the core opportunity: finding and viewing locations.

We added filtering controls in all the ways the Ministry of Health dataset would allow. Users can enter a search string and select particular regions, as well as refine and order the results based on date of exposure event and date the location of interest was added to the list.

Conveying the relevant information was also an important part of the project, so we built panels to view results in both map and table views. Users can toggle between viewing the map and table side-by-side or individually in full width. On mobile viewports the table panel is displayed by default, with the option to switch to the map.

The style guide for the site was based on branding of the Unite Against COVID-19 website. Their team has done a fantastic job of creating unified communications across web, digital, and print, and so we wanted to leverage this familiarity to provide a sense of trust and security.

Given how closely aligned we were to the Ministry of Health and Unite Against COVID-19, it was important to make clear that this was a community-driven site and not a Government-sanctioned tool. We weren’t trying to be a replacement for official health advice, nor the sole source of information for New Zealanders. Throughout the site we emphasised to follow the Ministry of Health’s guidelines and included links to their content.

User Testing

Whilst the site was being developed I organised a few user testing sessions (online, adapting for lockdown of course) to ensure we were meeting our goal for the project. I ran these pretty informally, opting not to provide any background details or example scenarios, instead simply observing the participant’s natural reactions over screen share.

I first asked the participants to use the Ministry of Health’s site to find locations of interest. No specific criteria was provided, just instructions to use the site as they normally would. After this I then sent a link to our version and asked them to repeat the process.

Overall users were able to quickly and efficiently find the information they needed to know with our site. These testing sessions helped clarify that the tool was intuitive and easy to understand, and overall gave us confidence that Locations of Interest would be a useful asset to the community.

Following the public release we also installed the behavioural analytics tool Hotjar to observe usability, learn how people were using the site, and proactively catch and fix any experience issues.

The reception to this project has been overwhelming, and the New Zealand tech community has been so incredibly supportive. We’ve had amazing ideas and improvements suggested to us, developers have contributed to the repository to assist with new features and help improve A11Y compliance, and so many people have reached out to help promote the site and share it across their networks.

I’m so grateful for the opportunity to help the community during a difficult lockdown. I hope it’s made a difference for New Zealanders, because it sure has for us.

https://locationsofinterest.co.nz/