UX Kitchen Covid19 Design Challenge Team Safi:
How might we encourage social distancing and hygienic practices, such as regular washing of hands and face touching?
Below is the design process to a proposed partial solution
Problem Description and Background
The structured design challenge gave a chance to learn about user experience design. The online workshops helped provide suggestions and feedback throughout the solution design process.
The first part of the process involved understanding the problem statement. Our understanding of social distancing involves:
- Minimising the number of times one is closer than 1 meter to someone.
- Avoiding social contact
- Maintaining civilised behaviour
We identified the main hygienic practices to be encouraged as
- Hand washing
- Not touching possibly contaminated surfaces
- Sneezing and coughing hygienically
The second part of the process involved identifying stakeholders. The stakeholders were grouped into
Rural low income earners This is a group with poor access to healthcare where typically single households have members who live in close contact. For this group, radio may be more effective than printed materials for communication. Communication from nearby people may also be a useful way to deliver information. There may be language barriers for some who are not very comfortable with obtaining information in English or Kiswahili. There may also be barriers to behavioural change due to education and cultural norms.
Urban low income earners This group will typically have poor access to healthcare and reside in crowded areas. Radio and TV are likely influential communication media. SMS messages and social media may also be helpful communication media. Barriers to behavioural change include language ability, education and cultural norms.
SME owners This group is quite broad, their main aim will be to ensure the continuation of business. They will need to put in place measures to protect their employees. The informal sector will likely require extra attention.
The general populace can also be put into age groups that have different concerns, due to their typical activities and risks of fatality. The general population (ages 25–65) will be assumed to not require any special considerations. For infants (ages 0–3) information targeted towards legal guardians and caregivers would be useful. For children (ages 4–12) who are not in school, one of the concerns is how they can be kept occupied at home. Also of interest is means of communication they can use while socially distanced with their peers and appropriate learning opportunities they can utilise. Teenagers (ages 13–17) also need to be kept occupied at home and to have opportunities to learn. They also need to communicate while socially distanced. The youth (ages 18–25) are a group which also comprises many students who are prevented from learning in traditional settings. Many may also be working or looking for work. Finally the elderly (age 65 and above) will need care since they have a higher susceptibility to the virus.
Grouping people according to health conditions to produce stakeholders is also helpful. Such groups include people with pre-existing health conditions; people who have been infected and are still infected and do not have symptoms; people who have been infected and do have symptoms; and people who have been infected and recovered.
People working in essential services. Some services identified as essential are supermarkets, delivery, security, pharmacies, hospitals, farms, the financial sector (in particular banks), media, government services and the military. These service sectors have slightly different needs and some can manage to minimize the number of contacts with other people each day (for example those in farms and the military). Those working in hospitals, pharmacies and supermarkets will need to ensure precautions are followed in their places of work to minimize their exposure risks.
Rather than try to find solutions that can fit all these stakeholders, we focused on children and teenagers. Recognising that their learning would be disrupted and that social distancing can be improved by having activities they can do at home, we created a language learning game.
Many language learning applications typically do not address small languages, of which there are many in Africa. An example existing language learning application with a great user journey is Feed the monster. However this is somewhat challenging to update as it is written using Unity which while convenient does not allow as great control of the resulting software. Hangman is a game that has also been used for language learning, even for Mandarin and Japanese . The game concept can also be changed to reflect happier themes.
The prototype was therefore created with HTML, javascript and CSS which are community driven standardised technologies that many front end developers learn. Rather than go through an extensive design and stakeholder feedback phase, we created an initial prototype. This was done as part of a 72 hour hackathon in which a Hangman game for Kiswahili was created. This allowed for some feedback, such as removing popups, adding translations, adding music and some animation. This feedback was incorporated and further languages added. To enable widespread reuse, the software is released under the unlicense, but individual translations and wordlists each have their own license information as determined by their creators.
The games can now be found here, with Gaelic and Punjabi incorporating music, forthcoming to Dholuo and other languages. Feel free to request further features here and/or make contributions or use a modified version of the game for your own purposes, for example as done by Kasahorow for a variety of African languages, for example Gadangabe .
The game can be downloaded and run on a smart phone or computer so does not require internet access which is expensive relative to the average income of most stakeholders. However, only a subset of the targeted population have access to smartphones and computers, though it is expected that this number will grow.
We thank the organizers, mentors and participants for the feedback and support.
Cheers!
Written by Benson Muite.
