Role: Senior UX Researcher
Challenge: In December 2021, President Biden announced that his administration would be providing 500 million free at-home COVID-19 tests to US Citizens. Just after Christmas, the White House finalized an agreement with the US Postal Service to facilitate the delivery and the online ordering of the tests with a launch date of January 19, 2022.
Tools: Sketch App, InVision App, Medallia
Project Time: 3 weeks
Strategy: My team, USPS.com Brand Management, leveraged USPS.com's existing e-commerce, and address verification capabilities to facilitate the development of a simple web form. Our goal was to minimized user confusion, eliminate unnecessary fiction, and ultimately build customer confidence in government digital services. We partnered with USPS IT and White House US Digital Service representatives and reported to USPS and White House senior staff.
I created high-fidelity mockups and clickable prototypes for a web app for US citizens to order free at-home COVID-19 tests from USPS. I facilitated 3 user research experiments using 2 user flow options and accessibility testing. I collaborated with the project team daily to ensure the latest policy updates, research results, and development statuses were communicated to and understood by the entire team. We developed 3 forms in parallel, using different platforms, for redundancy in case of system failures due to high traffic.
The final Covid-19 test ordering user flow.
Results: The product launched 4 days ahead of schedule. Neither the form nor its informational landing page, COVIDTest.gov, page experienced load balancing issues and quickly became the top two visited web pages in the federal government. The average time to complete the transaction was 90 seconds. Users and the media, who were skeptical of a large e-commerce government website after the problematic launch of healthcare.gov, expressed highly positive feedback collected in Medallia surveys, social media comments, and media coverage. In addition, address verification issues were addressed in real-time by adjusting microcopy and making the service reporting process more transparent. I shared insights and recommendations from this project with the USPS.com Postal Store team, which is currently redesigning the e-commerce platform.
