MA Covid Vaccine Help Website Restructure
When Covid vaccine supply was low, MCVH helped thousands of at-risk people book vaccine appointments. I restructured their website so that people seeking appointments could try to help themselves first before taking up valuable volunteer time and effort.
Background
Massachusetts Covid Vaccine Help (MCVH) was a volunteer organization that booked Covid vaccine appointments for at-risk people in hard-hit communities in early 2021. At the time, vaccine supply was limited and vaccine appointments were almost impossible for anyone but the most persistent and tech-savvy to find and book.
The Problem
In March, thousands of people had requested help via an intake form on the MCVH website, and were waiting on volunteers to book an appointment for them, but volunteers were overwhelmed and couldn’t keep up with demand. Additionally, some people filled out the intake form before trying to book an appointment on their own, and ended up no longer needing one by the time a volunteer booked one for them. The volunteers were frustrated by this unnecessary work.
The organization’s founder created the site quickly to meet the overwhelming need she saw. The original homepage was naively put together with poor accessibility and structure. The site also included a page that explained how to book an appointment on your own, but due to being put together rapidly, it was long and had issues with structure and organization.
The Solution
I created the following list of goals:
Make the homepage more accessible—including making text more accessible, and keeping the background image in the background (the background image itself was not something the organization was willing to change!)
Guide users to the how-to page instead of to the intake form, with the goal that many would use the page to successfully book their own appointment without needing volunteer intervention.
Improve the how-to page so that it was clear, succinct, and easy to navigate.
Work well on mobile, since almost 75% of traffic came from mobile.
Before we could guide people to the how-to page, we needed to make significant improvements to it. Originally, the vaccine appointment process was organized into six steps, which were displayed in two rows of three columns of varying lengths. We replaced this with a simple top-to-bottom, step-by-step approach. We also improved the copy to make it clear and easy to follow.
Next, we reworked the homepage. Instead of having long, explanatory buttons that were all the same color, we exchanged these for smaller buttons that were answers to questions. The primary button led to the how-to page, and the secondary button led to the intake form.
We added a large button to the top of the intake form that led to the how-to page, as a final way to screen users who did not really need volunteer assistance to book an appointment. Additionally, we included a smaller secondary button near the top of the how-to page in case a user had already tried to book an appointment themselves and really did need help.
The Results
What we didn’t know when creating this solution was that the vaccine supply would increase dramatically in a short period of time, so that demand for help from MCVH would decrease significantly. The site did see proportionally more traffic to the how-to page, which likely corresponds to more people using it to book an appointment. Anecdotally, many people were able to use the how-to page to book their appointment and appointments for their loved ones.
Because demand dropped so significantly, the organization decided to sunset, and I did the necessary changes to the website to communicate its service ending.