Problem
The process to deliver this kind of information was lengthy, prone to error and misleading interpretations: I, like many other people, was often unsure about what I was allowed to do or not. This situation provided a double opportunity.
A technical one, because the Civil Protection uploaded semi-structured data of the up-to-date situation across regions on Github, each week, and a competitive one, because the rest of “COVID zones” websites all offered a colored map of Italy, without actually solving the problem.
We generated incomplete, hi-fidelity mockups of just a few screens on Figma to jam on them together and discuss the core aspects of the application in a synchronous way. The day after, Giuliano and I were already writing code.
Navigation
As simple as possible
We tried to stay as true as possible to the initial goal of providing a simple user experience and reduce the amount of unnecessary interactions between the user and their mission.
So we built a simple splash screen that let the user choose whether to view up to date information by using their geolocation to determine the region they’re in, or choosing it from a heatmap-inspired, very simple list.
If the user’s position was found in one of the Italian regions, the app would show the region’s page with the appropriate color coding, and a list of permitted activities with the relative measures of precaution.
Data modelling and serving
The sweat behind the scenes
Checolo.re has been a very exciting project because, other than representing a product design challenge, it forced us to build an automation that would programmatically fetch, process, store and serve data behind the scenes not just once, but each week.
So I created a Github action that each week would run a custom a python script that fetched the zip file from the Civil Protection’s repository on Github, extract its .xml file, format it as JSON, discard any unneeded information and push it to a public Gist.
Impact
Impact Cards here
Outcome
And finally, some recognition
The project has been featured on Maize, H-Farm’s magazine, as one of the best COVID-themed apps, and has appeared on a multitude of online articles, as well as LinkedIn posts of people who wanted to share helpful tools to face the hard times we all have been through.