Using design thinking to find the gaps in MA’s Covid vaccine rollout

In May 2021, most people assumed that anyone not getting the Covid-19 vaccine had made a conscious choice not to get vaccinated. I used design thinking to show that this assumption wasn’t true, that instead many people who wanted a vaccine simply couldn’t get one.

Background

By late April 2021, Massachusetts Covid Vaccine Help (MCVH) had booked thousands Covid vaccine appointments for at-risk people in hard-hit communities. Many of those people had been eligible to get a vaccine for weeks, but hadn’t yet been vaccinated due to severe obstacles, including language barriers, lack of weekend appointment times, and technological hurdles.

The state had a well-publicized vaccine equity effort, but it focused almost exclusively on vaccine hesitancy, i.e., not wanting to get a vaccine. It did not focus on the practical barriers people who did want a vaccine faced.

I used personas and user journeys in order to clarify where the gaps in the vaccine rollout were, in order to better equip partner organizations like MIRA and Vaccine Equity Now! to communicate the issues to policy makers. I wanted to make sure that there was support for people at each step in the vaccination process. I also used the results of this project to create graphics that could be quickly and easily understood by the general public to help create better awareness of the vaccine equity issue.

Creating personas for populations having trouble getting vaccinated

As an organization, MCVH knew about the obstacles to getting a vaccine, but they hadn’t yet been collected or presented in a digestible way. They had put together a laundry list of barriers, but not every barrier applied to every individual having trouble getting a vaccine, and it was unclear how severe the problems were. I decided to create user personas in order to show who was having trouble, and ultimately use those personas to show what the specific barriers were.

I gathered information from interviews with knowledgable volunteers working to book appointments. From these conversations, I was able to put together three different personas:

1. A minority language speaker: “Rosa"

2. Two hourly workers with a tight or variable schedules with limited transportation options: “Cassie and Leo”

3. An older individual with health and technology challenges: “Alice"

Each of these personas represented a population of people who consistently sought help from MCVH due to major obstacles in being able to get a vaccine. I used these personas to map out specifically how they were failing to get the vaccine.

Creating user journeys to find the barriers in the vaccine rollout

Now that I had three personas, I wanted to show the specific obstacles each of those personas faced while trying to get a vaccine.

In order to determine the steps each persona tried to take, I divided their journey into four (or five) steps:

1. Deciding to get the vaccine

2. Booking an appointment

3. Traveling to their appointment

4. Navigating the vaccine appointment site

5. (If applicable) Getting their second dose

For each of these steps, I documented several things:

1. What the persona was likely thinking trying to perform the step

2. What the specific obstacle was

3. What organizations (if any) were addressing the obstacle

4. Whether the state (MA) was doing enough to address the obstacle as a part of their vaccine equity initiative

The Findings

After completing each of the user journeys, I found several barriers to vaccination in each population. I chose to present each one as a shareable infographic in order to make the information accessible and interesting for the general population.

These vaccine journeys were shared with Vaccine Equity Now! and MIRA so that those organizations could put them in front of policy makers to better illustrate the barriers facing thousands of MA residents.

Today, there are more walk-in vaccine clinics during weekends, which address several of the barriers listed on these graphics and has led to thousands more vaccinated individuals from vulnerable populations. By partnering with powerful organizations, this design work helped show what needed to be done in a concise and colorful way.

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