A Tale of Frustrating UX and Covid-19 Vaccinations

 During the COVID-19 pandemic, UC San Diego put out a call for volunteers to help out at their vaccination super stations here in San Diego County. The job would involve tasks such as checking people in, directing traffic, running supplies back and forth, watching over people as they waited 15 minutes after vaccination to make sure they were ok, and other such duties. 

It was a wonderful opportunity to help out the community, give back, and as a bonus, volunteers were offered a chance to receive the COVID vaccine at the end of their shift. As this was before the vaccine was easily accessible to all, it seemed like a good opportunity all around, so I signed up. 

After getting through the background check required for all volunteers, I gained access to the volunteer portal with the promise that I could then sign up for shifts. Excited, I signed up and requested the day off of work. When the day arrived, I woke up at 5AM in order to get to La Jolla in time for my early morning shift. There was a lot of fog that morning and the drive was rather treacherous, but I made it. I parked, walked to the volunteer center, and got in line to check in for my shift. 

When I got to the front desk, however, I was informed I wasn't on the list for that day. Confused, I showed them the confirmation email I had received and pulled up the website with my name on the calendar for that day. The lady at the check-in desk sighed. This was clearly something she had dealt with often. She informed me that I had to wait for a second confirmation email and that the first confirmation email was only to inform me that I had signed up for a shift, not that I had received it. However, I was free to wait in the foyer in case they needed more volunteers. She gestured to a room that had about 20 other people waiting around.

Having taken the day off and made all that effort, I waited, hoping they needed some extra volunteers, but as I heard the lady continue to tell more and more people the same thing after me, I got a sinking feeling.

When they came to announce to our group that they only needed 5 extra volunteers and they would go in order of arrival, I was disappointed to learn that I wasn't one of the people who would be able to volunteer that day. 

It had all been a big waste of time.

So, what happened? 

In short, it was bad UX. Really bad UX.

Being a UX Designer, however, my first instinct was to come up with a better solution that would help make things more clear. Since I had the day off already, I spent the day feverishly designing a solution that would be more clear and eliminate this kind of confusion. 

Here is that exercise:

Personas

Some quick personas to help me understand who might be trying to volunteer, and why they are doing it. 

Flows

In order to properly make some updates, I had to first understand the current site flow, and what might be needed in order to improve it. 

The Portal

First, let's talk about the portal. When you sign up to volunteer, they send you an email with the link to the portal. It turns out that is the only link to the portal that will ever exist. The site you see here actually didn't link to the same portal where you could sign up for COVID-19 vaccine volunteer shifts. It only linked to their regular volunteer portal, which wasn't at all linked in any way to the COVID volunteer portal. Super confusing. Solving this would be easy, in my mind...just use one portal and only show the kinds of shifts a volunteer is authorized to volunteer for, be they COVID shifts or other shifts. They could even have a tabbed system within the logged in portal to toggle between COVID shifts and regular shifts for their volunteers who are authorized for both. That would solve a lot of confusion.

But let's talk about the logged in portal itself....

Signing Up For Shifts

This is what the portal looks like when you're logged in...

In this image, I had already signed up for a Runner shift. The terms "upcoming schedule", "If you are unable to make your shift, please call", and "My placed opportunities" all led me to believe that I was signed up and ready to go for this shift. However, when I showed up for the shift, I was informed that I was not actually signed up. This is really confusing UX and led to a lot of frustrated people.

This is an image of what the portal looked like for searching and scheduling shifts. As you can see, it looks like I'm signed up for March 8th. I was informed upon arrival that apparently it should have said 'placed' rather than 'referred', but this information wasn't explained anywhere.

My Solution

A few really simple updates to this site would help mitigate this kind of confusion, saving hopeful volunteers time and frustration, and saving the hard-working staff at UCSD time and energy spent on turning away frustrated volunteers each day. Here are the updates I propose:

First, the dashboard. 

• Moving the referred opportunities to the left instead of integrating them with the schedule eliminates confusion over whether or not those are scheduled shifts, or just the kinds of opportunities a volunteer is eligible to participate in.
• Changing the buttons to very clear indicators of status with both text and color indicators helps volunteers to know exactly where they stand. Instead of vague terminology, they can see 'placed', 'not yet placed', or 'canceled' and know with an easy glance if they are signed up for a shift or not.
• Adding the ability to withdraw pending requests, cancel shifts that are more than 24 hours in the future, or remove canceled shifts from the schedule with the click of a button makes it easier for volunteers to manage their schedule without having to call the phone number (which is manned by a bot, by the way)
• If a shift is within 24 hours, letting the volunteer know they need to call the number is appropriate in this case. However, only having that option show for tomorrow's volunteers instead of all volunteers frees up those phone lines for the most important calls. 
• Adding help text below the buttons to further explain the status of the shift helps to clarify any questions the volunteer might have about the shift status.
• I updated the 'search for opportunities' box at the top to include more clear instructions on how to schedule a shift.
• I added frequently asked questions to the bottom of this page so that potential volunteers could easily access important information, which also helps the UCSD staff to spend less time fielding the same questions over and over.
• I added a tabbed system for 'all opportunities', 'placed opportunities' and 'requested opportunities' to the top of the schedule to allow users to only see the things that matter most to them.

The Schedule List

I changed the buttons on the schedule list to clarify how many available places remain for a given shift, and changed the button to say 'request' to clarify for users that they need to request this shift. This language was unclear in the original version.

Conclusions

This was a very quick exercise on a few simple to implement changes that would really improve the user experience of the volunteer portal.