How to improve UX during the COVID-19 pandemic

As of the time of writing this article, there is hardly anyone who can claim to be unaffected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost everyone has been at the receiving end of the social and economic effects arising from this crisis — which means that we can safely assume every single person to be a “user” of this global phenomenon. Hence, to say that there are options of improving the “user experience” is not wishful thinking.

Reading on, you will come across 5 scenarios (and a bonus) that I’ve encountered (or, seen someone encounter) in the span of March-May of 2020. These are real-life problems that people are facing, contributing to a bad UX and a rise in overall frustration and stress levels. “Variety” in the personas has been my priority in deciding on the cases you’re about to read — hence the problems are being identified over three broad levels —

• Users
• Customers
• Communities

For each scenario presented, I will walk you through the affected persona, the context and possible solutions for improving the user experience.
Let’s begin!

1. Mandatory warnings in phone caller tunes

Affected —
Everyone (with a phone) — customer level

Context of the problem

You want to catch up on your friends, and decide to call them — the good ol’ phone call. You bring up their contact, press call, and for the next 30 seconds all you hear is a pre-recorded message urging you to stay at home, reiterating that while we are in this pandemic together our fight is against the disease and not the diseased, urging the citizens to cooperate with the health workers and the law enforcers to maintain peace and stability in society, reminding you to call the state help line number or the central help line number if needed, and that this message is from the Government of India for the benefit of all citizens. First of all, the helplines are spoken too fast to memorise in the first try. And after a week of hearing this message every time a call needs to be made, any sane person would want to reach inside the phone, and “shhhh” the recording — it gets frustrating, fast.

Besides, what about emergencies? In times when a single second of delay might spell out death for critical patients needing an ambulance, would this message really hit home? If a victim wants to call the police, locking himself/herself up in a closet, away from a domestic abuser, would that message really help the cause?

No.

Possible solution

Not just a temporary solution for fighting COVID-19, but for all future emergencies and national crises, the most convenient solution would be to have in place a national helpline/hotline of sorts. Just like we can dial 100 for Police, 101 for Fire-services and 102 for Ambulances, we should ideally have a national hotline that is allotted to large-scale crises. That way all people will know where to call in the case of such occurrences.

An obvious question arises, how will emergency workers of an area be able to respond to local callers? Each hotline can be a combination of x numbers, say “123” followed by the pin-code of the person making the call. So if I were calling the national emergency hotline, I’ll need to dial “123700012” if 700012 were my pin-code. This way, the hotline would be national, yet able to cater at a local scale.

2. Quarantine experience for COVID-19 victims

Affected —
People who have been/are being quarantined — community level

Context of the problem

People suspected of being COVID-19 patients are being forced to go into quarantine — be it home-quarantine, or in quarantine centres demarcated by the government. Quarantines not only pose serious logistical challenges, but are only effective at slowing down the spread of the disease, without any decrease in contamination rates whatsoever. In addition, these measures hamper the supply of food, medicines and medical equipments. The efficiency of living quarantined is highly unconvincing due to bad compliance rates among citizens. Even the conditions in which quarantined people are staying, is not appropriate. The elderly are being super-isolated. All quarantined suspects are living in close proximity and hence going into quarantine shelters alone, increases the chance of contaminating and being contaminated manifold.

Moreover, the deceased are being dealt with no dignity at all. Since the official crematoriums and burial grounds are running out of space, people have been resorting to all kinds of disposal methods, bordering on inhumanity. There have been reported instances of dead bodies being packed up in polythene bags, and set on fire; bodies being dumped into roadside fields — posing as a threat not only to what makes us human, but also to the health and hygiene of the general public.

Possible solution

Countless research studies, like this one have shown time and again that quarantine and isolation are not pragmatic solutions in the long run. Instead of lockdowns and blocking off parts or whole of cities, it would probably be better to follow traditional public health measures. Health care workers and officials should instead focus on identifying the infections and monitor contacts. Rapid medical emergency help should be always available, and educating the masses about the general precautions like frequent hand-washing and maintaining physical distance with people should be priorities. We need social solidarity in these times, not “social-distancing”.

Electric furnaces in crematoriums are capable of handling loads, in the worst case, and should be the go-to solution. Proper hygienic measures need to be followed while disposing of the deceased. Living or dead, humans should, and have the right to be treated with dignity.

3. Non-COVID-19 patients

Affected —
People requiring hospitalisation due to non-COVID-19 causes — user level

Context of the problem

This has two stories — both from personal experience. My grandmother’s brother suffered a massive heart attack at his home a few days ago. His wife and children took him to the nearest hospital where he was refused treatment because they were busy doing saliva-tests for COVID-19-suspects. After being similarly harassed at 3 more hospitals, he was finally taken admission at a private hospital against an extra charge. He underwent an angiogram and subsequent coronary artery bypass graft surgery, and is quite stable now. The harassment was quite jarring and scary for the family members, not to mention the plight of the patient being dragged around from one corner of the city to the other.

The second story — a childhood friend of my father’s, passed away a week ago at his village home, after falling from the bed and suffering a fatal heart attack. He was taken to the nearest hospital and the doctors claimed that the hospital was shut down for normal patients, while there were tests being carried out for anyone who walked in and claimed that they suspected themselves of being COVID-19 patients. Even after repeated requests, they would not take a look, leave aside the prospect of getting a death certificate. The family members carried him to the next nearest hospital — walking — which was more than half a dozen miles away (this is a rural area mind you), and got the death certificate done. Only then was the cremation procedure completed. If you feel for them, imagine being in the shoes of one of those family members.

Anyone would feel sickened.

Possible solution

Just because swab-tests for COVID-19 are being carried out in a hospital, does not mean in any way, that the hospital is “shut down” for non-COVID patients. This will only achieve in increasing the mortality rate manifold. Of course there can be departments in a hospital, allotted to that specific purpose — even cordoning out a major portion of the hospital for COVID-19 patients is not a bad idea. But there should always be provisions for people in medical emergencies to receive aid at the earliest. There should always be doctors available to help people in need, COVID-19-suspects, or not.

Issuing a death certificate is the responsibility of all registered medical practitioners. Patients and family members should not be harassed at any cost, more so in these times. If every healthcare worker and official lived upto the vows they took, or at the very least, undertook a humane approach, no patient, deceased or family member would have to suffer as much as they are.

4. Home-offices and home-schools

Affected —
Office-goers, school-goers, college-goers — user and/or customer level

Context of the problem

Work from home is everywhere! From people complaining about not being productive at home, to Twitter deciding to follow the work-from-home model, even after lockdown is lifted, as it is not affecting their work in any significant way — everyone is being affected by it in some way or the other. And any form of working from home makes collaboration software an absolute necessity. This is where the problem comes in.

Work from home does not mean only the middle-aged tech savvy developer typing away to glory with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones on, oblivious to his kids quarrelling over a cooky behind him. No — from elder adults to school-going children — everyone is now “working” from home, implying that everyone is using collaboration software to communicate and “work”. The thing is, most of these software have not been designed keeping universal design in mind. Designing for elder adults and designing for children are in themselves two broad fields which require extensive research and iterative design to get things (almost) right. Unfortunately, most companies push this segment to the bottom of the to-do checklist and hence the least attention is paid to designing for the extreme outlying segments of human population. This leads to plenty of avoidable mistakes and usability problems peppered across the entire experience of working on the collaboration software. Not to mention, fretting over whether privacy and security are actually guaranteed.

Possible solution

Frankly, there is not much that can be immediately done. The long-term solution to this problem involves thorough audits of all collaboration software done bottom-up. This should help identify the cracks and solve the problems from the root, and not just giving them a quick temporary patch-up fix. Usability problems plague almost all major software and services, and should not be taken lightly, even if stats show that only a tiny segment of the population are being affected.

No one can tell when that “tiny segment” becomes a considerable portion of the user-base due to external factors — like what happened with the lockdown resulting in all children and senior adults having to shift to collaboration software. We need dramatic simplification of all established collaboration software services to create large scale impact. Universal design should always be of the highest priority.

5. The Ration Card fiasco

Affected —
All households deserving benefits from the Government — community level

Context of the problem

This dives into fishy political waters, and it might be dangerous to dive too deep; so I’ll stay close to the surface and give you a glimpse of the facts and current scenario. Every citizen has a ration card — an official document provided by State Governments of India. Households that are eligible to purchase subsidised cereals and pulses, from the Public Distribution System have a unique ration card which they can show at the ration-distribution shops and collect their amenities on a weekly/biweekly/monthly basis as deemed fit. However, getting a proper ration card is a sketchy process especially in rural areas. There have been instances of ration cards not being distributed to the villagers, but kept aside — instead, the very amenities that the villagers should have received for free, were sold to them.

In other cases, when villagers would show up at the shops to receive their amenities, they would be told that their cards were invalid, and they needed to apply for new cards. Of course when they applied and submitted their forms, the cards never showed up and the villagers took it as a lost cause. Yet again, when the Government sends food grains to distributor-shops to give out the underprivileged for free, local goons have often been accused of setting a part of the rations aside, and either selling it out later, or using it among themselves. Also a major inherent disadvantage of ration cards is that it needs to be used only in the states that they were issued in — so migrant labours stuck in other states due to the lockdown are not at a huge loss.

These happenings are just sad.

Possible solution

One possible solution that I think could be looked into, is decentralising the distribution of ration supplies. Instead of the details of the distribution process being known to just the inner circle of the people “in-charge”, the process of something of such a broad scale and huge impact as ration-distribution should be open and viewable to everyone. I take this inspiration from the working principle behind blockchain technology. Why not keep a public ledger of ration being produced, distributed and received?

There have been recent plans like the “One Nation, One Ration” scheme which have been proposed to be implemented in the near future to take care of national portability of the ration cards. However, if one is to truly solve this problem, it has to be made visible to the public. As long as transactions happen behind closed doors, shady practises will prevail.

[Bonus] We need better design(ers)

Affected —
Users of products with sub-par design solutions — user level

Context of the problem

A picture is worth a thousand words right? Let me show you a notification pop-up that has been doing the rounds for quite some time now, and you’ll get my point.

Absurd, funny and unsettling at the same time, the problem is severe. This pandemic came out of the blue hitting copy-writers and UX writers when they were totally unaware of how they should deal with the problem. As hilarious as it might seem to you and me, imagine a COVID-19 survivor who just escaped the jaws of death, receiving this notification — let’s just say that this is not going to be a pleasant design to behold.

Solution

Communication rules should be followed at all times, especially when they have been laid down by as prominent domain experts as the WHO themselves. All copy should —
– get straight to the point,
– clarify the desired outcome, and
– use simple words to prevent risk of complication

No one likes to face ambiguities — more so, when each wrong decision could spell danger. Familiar words and plain expressions get the job done — often better than fancy wordage. We designers need to be upping our game constantly for the betterment of people all around the globe. Design has very high impact, good and bad. Here’s a fantastic demonstration by Alexander Byrne, of how simple and often unnoticed changes in a podium placard can change the overall mood and theme of the setting. As much as bad design breaks us, good design has wonderful implications that we may not even recognise.

These 6 case studies simply scratched the surface of ways in which we can identify problems and their underlying reasons, and work together to solving them.

When we are not prepared for a challenge, we often end up making mistakes. And that is exactly what happened in the face of the (almost-)global lockdown. But now, as we learn how to work on persisting problems and eradicate bad UX, the responsibilities lie on the shoulders of the UX people. Such a crisis calls for the core value of any user experience professional — empathy.

We are starting to see very positive trends — we see more people working towards establishing and improving the common good than ever before, and that is absolutely heart-warming. People are scared, many are anxious and some are getting frustrated due to the long-reaching effects of this global pandemic. It is upto us, to not only comfort and help these people, but to use our expertise to make the world better together, one good design at a time.

Cheers!