OVP: Covid Assistance Portal

Office of the Vice President of the Philippines

Communicating COVID-19 relief information.

Project Role

Design Intern

Timeline

November 2020

2 Weeks

Skills & Tools

UI/UX Design

Figma

Procreate

Photoshop

The Office of the Vice President of the Philippines receives thousands of messages daily from people asking how they can contribute to the Office’s COVID-19 relief efforts. I was brought on as a design intern to assist in the creation of an online portal consolidating all of the Offices’ programs in order to remove the friction faced by citizens who want to help.

This project required me to conform to the OVP’s Angat Buhay Project branding and its website’s current style.

🤔 The Problem

How do I design an intuitive system to remove friction for both benefactors and beneficiaries of COVID-19 relief operations?

🧠 Ideation

Understanding the User

Due to the time and resource constraints of this project, conducting thorough user research was unfortunately not an option. Instead, I turned to what I knew – the project scope and prior knowledge of the community around me – and ideated to identify key goals that the design should meet.

🌟 North Star

01.

The platform must be simple – not all users will be technologically literate, nor will they all have access to high-speed internet.

02.

Most operations will still be done offline, so the most important thing to do is to provide information in the least amount of clicks.

03.

Because of the number of assistance programs, the portal should only contain basic information for users to go through.

🛠 Process

Low-fi Wireframes

I jumped right into low-fi wireframing in Figma after defining my design goals. I focused on keeping things simple and concise to avoid overwhelming the user.

🛠 Icon Designs

Visually Representing Assistance Programs

In order to reduce the user's cognitive load when browsing the site, I designed a set of icons to represent each assistance program. The use of visual aids helps break up what would have been a long list of text on the site. Visually representing each assistance program proved to be challenging, as most couldn't really be represented by a single image. These icons were also used for other OVP collaterals surrounding its COVID-19 initiatives.

🤓 Learnings

01.

Understand the user, no matter what it takes.

Although I wasn't able to conduct traditional user research, having an understanding of the user was actually essential to the success of this project. Forgoing flashy UI and prioritizing function over anything else was key to making sure the intended users get the most out of the platform. I'm extremely lucky that I was designing for people within my own community on this project.

02.

Designing for good feels good!

I'm very grateful to have worked on this project, especially at the height of the pandemic. Design is truly something that can help improve lives, beyond just social apps and smart beds (although both those things are super cool too!).