Premise
In May, I attended a virtual meetup hackathon due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. We were randomly placed on five teams in order to come up with a solution to the prompt. There are five members in my group and the time we had to come up with a solution was 1 hour and 15 minutes.
Prompt
“During previous Beer and UX events, the Neuron team gave presentations on dark patterns and bringing ethics to the forefront of design in 2020. The mission of this hackathon is designing for COVID-19. We see great benefits to Apple and Google’s tracing technology collaboration, which strives to provide valuable data to the medical community to get a handle on the spread of the virus. However we acknowledge that there could be serious concerns for its use as well. Your task is to: Define a scenario where this app could have negative consequences Come up with a UX solution to your problem Create a mock-up in figma of your solution (low-fidelity is fine) Present your solution and be prepared to defend it Each team will get 10 minutes to present followed by 5 minutes of feedback Our panel will deliberate, provide additional feedback, and ultimately award the winning team.”
Our Approach
Our team broke down the prompt and chose to focus on what dark mode was. Dark mode is when companies trick users into doing actions that are unintentional in order to gain something. The problem that we tried to tackle was how companies send you agreements that you have to agree to use their product. Very few people end up reading all the legal jargon so we decided to set out and tried to design a solution to this problem.
During the covid-19 pandemic people are going to get tested if they have the virus. Large companies like Apple and Google are going to store and use the data. Users have to trust these companies with their private and sensitive information. Our group explored how companies get users to agree to the terms and conditions and to see if there were ways to simplify them to help the users understand what they are agreeing to.
Mood Board
Our Solution
The app that we designed alerts people to whether or not they have been exposed to Covid-19 by telling them how long their phones were in contact with other phones. People are still going out to get supplies but what if you have knowingly caught the virus. We color coded the risk factors associated with making contact with someone who has tested positive for Covid-19. In addition, we provided information in order to try to lower the anxiety levels of the user.
The Goal
The goal of this solution is to get users to trust large companies without reading endless legal documents. If we can get users to trust this app on how to use their sensitive data like their Covid-19 status. Then we can apply it to other apps that require users to agree on legal documents before they can use them.