Covid19Vaxplorer: Vaccine Allocation Strategy Comparison
Background:This is my second project aiming at making an impact on a larger, potentially global scale. This is also my first project that directly tackles issues surrounding the ongoing pandemic. Through this project, I learned how to communicate with applied mathematicians to understand the way they think about modeling and advocate for user experience as a software developer.
After collaborating with Dr. Rafael Meza from the School of Public Health for several years on designing and building a lung cancer screening decision aid (shouldiscreen.com), he connected me with his colleague, Dr. Laura Matrajt from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, who was interested in creating a tool to simulate vaccine allocation strategy for a global pandemic. I worked as both a user experience advocate and a software developer to design and implement this tool.
My role(s): Designer, Developer
Collaborator(s): Dr. Laura Matrajt, Dr. Dobromir Dimitrov, Dr. Imelda Trejo Lorenzo
Motivation:Strategizing vaccine allocation for a pandemic is not an easy task. Health officials need to consider a complex set of factors, including the population composition, the level of social distancing on various occasions, current infection, vaccine availability, and how the population is vaccinated. With the outbreak of the pandemic, it is challenging to make vaccine allocation decisions when the stake is high.
Problem Solving:I worked with applied mathematicians to understand the various factors that can be modeled to predict the status of an ongoing infectious disease, including the number of cases. Given a large number of parameters (i.e., 191), I applied card sorting within our team to build consensus on a usable information architecture for organizing these parameters. I used paper prototyping as a medium to iterate our design and implement the proposed tool.
I developed a system, Covid19Vaxplorer, that enables users to specify parameters in a step-by-step process to illustrate one or multipe vaccine allocation strategies and allow side-by-side comparison of the simulation outcomes using visualization.
Requirement Gathering
2 experts
Card Sorting
Paper Prototyping
Outcomes:
The outcomes of this project include one manuscript (link) in submission and a web-based tool that allows health officials to simulate different vaccine allocation strategies.
We are currently testing the tool with colleagues to get feedback.
Summary:
Date: 2022 Spring
Tool: Covid19Vaxplorer: a COVID-19 Vaccine Allocation Comparison Tool
Research & Design Strategy