Skip Navigation or Skip to Content
My signatureAn animated signature of me signing my first name
0%
🎉
Full-Time

NOVID

Mar. 2020 - Jul. 2021
NOVID iOS app screenshots

The world's first pre-exposure notification app, shaping the next generation of tools to fight and prevent pandemics.

Role

Designer

Type

Native, Web, Print

Collaborators

Dean Dijour, Hannah Cai

Tools

UI, UX, Visual Design, User Research, Design Systems, Frontend

Background

🚜Please note that process for this portfolio piece is still under construction.

Shortly after the outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States, a world-reknown Carnegie Mellon math professor, Po-Shen Loh, hired myself and another designer, Dean Dijour, to begin ideating his vision of a novel digital approach to stop the spread of COVID-19 in mid-March 2020. We launched the first version of NOVID in early April 2020.

NOVID became the first pre-exposure notification app with the most accurate and anonymous contact tracing capabilities in the world.

The NOVID team grew to 20+ talented and passionate individuals building a solution that will be the foundation of next generation technology for pandemic response and prevention.

I led work on most of our designs spanning various mediums:

  • iOS & Android
  • Website
  • Chromebook App
  • Community & Testing Dashboards
  • Media, Print, & Poster Designs
  • Outreach Campaigns
  • Smart Watch App (Ideation)
  • Experimental Features

Table of Contents

I’ve done many different projects at NOVID. To navigate to a section of my work, please read through the links below.

Selected Media

Reflection

Most of my confidence as a designer has come through this experience. I worked with an absolutely incredible team and couldn’t be more proud of them and what we’ve accomplished together.

NOVID is by far the most broad and deep I’ve ever explored in my work. I often spent 80-100 hours/week early on, and still dozens per week until I weaned off the project. In Summer 2021 with vaccines widely available, we shifted the project towards research partnerships to validate our methods and findings for use in future pandemics (but hopefully lack thereof). While this document captures a range of my work, it leaves a substantial amount unshared.

I’ve learned how—and how not—to structure and scale design systems, communicate with my team, rapidly prototype solutions on extremely short deadlines, build product communities, hire designers, collaborate with developers, navigate socio-political barriers and contexts, and work with industry leaders. I feel incredibly empowered to tackle our world’s most challenging problems. Regularly showcasing my work to some of the most influential people in the world has been a tremendous responsiblity and honr, and one I certainly don’t take for granted.

I’ve learned how to balance my idea of design on high-stakes projects. As many designers do, I ultimately believe design can make or break a product. Consequently, I put a lot pressure on myself to perform and create good designs the first time, in a short time. Failing to do so would result in less trust or adoption, and ultimately lives lost. I had to realize and accept that not creating the perfect design the first time isn’t a failure of my abilities as a designer, but an inherent part of design and the design process. Not seeing immediate adoption and trust doesn’t mean I’ve failed as a designer, and I wish I had realized that earlier.

There are ultimately things I would also change. After our initial version of the app, our team grew substantially and our design team was stretched thin. We were cranking out designs quickly for numerous partnerships and prospective partnerships, new features or workarounds, building across platforms/devices, and having 2/3 of us designers also coding front-end for our web products. This took a substantial amount of time away from user research. Had we been able to bring on more designers, I would have loved to dedicate a substantital focus on user research across all our products (testing UX and processes, visualizations, communicating concepts, etc.). I would have also liked to improve our capturing analytics and using more concrete, quantative research and analysis to inform designs and our roadmap.

I'm truly grateful to have worked with this incredible team on such meaningful work, and no doubt will apply everything I've learned here in all my subsequent work.