This is a how-to in order to help a UX and UI (because they aren’t the same damn thing!) volunteer get started on Safe Places and document things I found while getting up to speed so that you don’t have to waste your time.

Overview

Safe Places is a “business” tool to help health authorities (HA) and contact tracers conduct a contact trace with their patients more effectively, with location data, and publish exposure data to their subscribers (general public located in the HA zone) so subscribers can assess their risk and monitor symptoms if they are exposed to someone who has tested positive for an infectious diseases (e.g. COVID-19).

It consists of two core features

1. Contact Trace (also called the Redactor) tool to help volunteers and employees of a HA to conduct a contact trace in addition to the tools they are already using (which are already compliant with various health/privacy regulations)

2. Publish/Admin tool to help HA admins manage which data ultimately gets published to subscribers (using Safe Paths) and manage contact tracer users in their system

Safe Places Users

There are 3 distinct users of Safe Places

1. Contact tracer, our main user, is a person who contacts and works with a patient who tested positive for an infectious disease (e.g. COVID-19) - responsible for interviewing a patient, reviewing their location to assess who they’ve come into contact with, and, specifically with the Safe Places tool, remove sensitive location data before it can be published to the public by a HA admin

   1. See this link for some more info on the contact tracer user https://www.today.com/health/what-coronavirus-contact-tracing-covid-19-contact-tracer-explains-job-t180125

2. Health Authority (HA) who owns their Safe Places tool, manages users (contact tracers), manages patient assignments, and can publish data to their subscribers on Safe Paths

3. Engineer (either on staff or recommended by Safe Paths team) that helps get the product setup for a HA - configuring the product, setting up a server, and connecting it to the Safe Places ecosystem

Demo Resources

1. Here is a demo link for Safe Places: https://covidsafepaths.org/safeplaces/

2. A video recording, presenting the Safe Places demo to a health authority: https://drive.google.com/file/d/19ZD_8LQ0NTkSQ5kVo9vAcvUDVfQz4vWZ/view

3. Documenting the demo workflow: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oKTztTgcqXC_GPjAefu2hD-rGvFQGK80/view

UX Resources, Moving Forward

adam laskowitz has been working through the foundational UX based on what’s already been built and what is required to make the product more usable by HA and contact tracers. In conjunction with Steve Penrod providing invaluable information about the whole system and his experience interacting with our users on demo calls.

The start of this work can be found here:

1. High level user workflows: https://overflow.io/s/S3MFUA?node=697c4034

2. Wireflows

   1. HA onboarding: https://overflow.io/s/S3MFUA?node=7fd2cbc2

   2. HA Publisher tool: https://overflow.io/s/S3MFUA?node=586e2294

   3. Contact Tracer Redaction (i.e. Contact Trace) tool: in notebook sketch form currently

      1. See user flow here: https://overflow.io/s/S3MFUA?node=80279077

3. Early high fidelity mock ups: https://www.figma.com/file/MlHKMJ02695qR2wsPByHCr/PLACES-April-2020?node-id=0%3A1

Things You Need To Know

1. Safe Places is not a hosted service for a HA to create an account and login to. It is a tool that needs to be cloned from Github (or given the code somehow), installed on their systems and stood up entirely as a single instance for the HA. This means a few things:

   1. A HA needs an engineer who can help them do this

   2. We don’t have a full product landing page as you would expect for a consumer product

   3. There isn’t an open ended account creation experience

2. Safe Places is used in conjunction with existing contact tracing tools and health authority systems. It is not a complete contact tracing tool. It is used to augment and slightly automate the contact tracing process.

   1. Augment: contact tracers have a hard time jogging patients memories of where they’ve been and who they’ve been in contact with. A tracer having map data to review with a patient helps significantly to draw historical context for a patient and help the tracer get better data.

   2. Automate: data from a patient is redacted and published to all Safe Path users in a region. This automates some of the network contacting a tracer has to do to get in touch with people who “might have been exposed.” Instead, the published data goes out and matches with each individual user’s data to see if they might have been exposed.

3. A contact tracer works with an individual patient at a time - no need to combine data sets for a contact tracer.

4. A HA owns the publishing of the data from all contact traces. They don’t really have context on each individual one, but they might need to edit data from time to time before committing a publish to the community.

5. A HA needs a Google Maps API key in order to use the tool

What’s next?

This document will remain relatively up to date - at least that is the goal. If you’d like to help out with Safe Places you should either get in touch with Ali Raizin or adam laskowitz.

Specifically to come next:

1. Rework user flows to reflect the “tool in addition to existing contact tracing tools” focus (originally reworking the UX focused on an all-encompassing tool, which is just false)

2. Wireframe the reworked user flows

3. Internal “test” with the product team

4. High fidelity mockups

5. Integrate processes with Front End dev team for implementation workflow