In January 2021, demand for the newly released COVID-19 vaccine was extremely high, and many people were frustrated at how difficult it was to find vaccination sites that had available appointments.
After a successful partnership launching their testing software, Project Beacon tapped Viget to create a tool for the state of Massachusetts that would easily identify vaccine sites and available appointments. The catch? It needed to be designed, built, and launched in just two weeks.
Two weeks is not much time to design and develop a tool that would inevitably receive a ton of traffic on day 1. To make up for the short amount of time we had to work with (and to keep the tool's look and feel in line with the rest of the state's digital properties), Viget designer Matthew Mocniak and I leveraged Massachusetts' state design system, Mayflower, to streamline screen layout and make front-end development as efficient as possible.
Rather than create a completely custom appointment sign-up tool, our team's goal was to scrape the appointment data from various existing scheduling sites across the state, (including both retail pharmacies and mass vaccination sites) and display them in a more legible, easily identifiable way.
Massachusetts residents would select their desired location and appointment time on our VaxFinder, then get redirected to that pharmacy's registration site to officially confirm their appointment.
