top of page
I want to go outside!
Presumably, there isn’t anyone who hasn’t been affected by the Covid 19 pandemic. Jobs were lost, trips were canceled and toilet paper was scarce. One thing we’ve all come to cherish more is face-to-face human interaction. Whether we’re doing driveway hangouts or grocery runs with a friend actually being outside with another person is exhilarating!
"6 feet, friend."
– Everyone (hopefully)
But even after a quick chat with a companion, guilt is inevitable. Should we have been outside? Should I have kept my mask on the whole time? Will this interaction put me or a loved one at risk? You begin to rack your brain over something so simple. Is there a way to be social and conscious at the same time?
How Big is My Bubble?
Our team wondered, would we at least feel more responsible if there was a way to track our interactions? Could we keep track of our friends, their behaviors and how often we see them? With that in mind, we began building an interface that allowed us to do just that. Ironically, we had all of these conversations virtually so we were craving social interactions as well.
Solution
Bubbel is a web app that promotes thoughtfulness and safer decisions within social groups. With this app, users can reflect on their own pandemic behaviors and asses, to the best of their abilities, their friends’ behaviors as well. Not only will people be able to keep track of their vaccination status, travel and grocery store runs, but they will see just how big their social “bubble” is. By seeing the true depth of their in-person interactions, people This way, even if someone should start showing signs of being sick, they’ll have a log of the last few people they’ve seen. Contact tracing made easy!
How it Works
Onboarding
In order to onboard, each person must fill out a set of questions designed to help them self-identify their levels of comfort with interactions in a covid-world. This isn't a quiz at all, at the end of the onboarding process the site will not analyze what you are or how you act. These questions just serve to get you in the right mindset to analyze yourself.
The Bubble
Inside the Bubbel site, you can see your profile (where you self identify your comfort levels as mindful, cautious or unconcerned and toggle your vaccination status) and your chosen “social bubble”. For each person listen in your bubble you can see how they self identify and the last time you saw them, according to your activity log.
Activity
In your recent activity, you can log where you’ve been, with who and for how long. It’s important to note whether each activity is an indoor or outdoor event, especially when considering who you’ve been with and their comfort levels with covid.
How this Helps
We're fully aware that social interaction could lead to infection whether or not you track it. Our hope is that Bubbel helps the people of the world become more mindful. It’s obvious that only people who actually care about lessening the threat of Covid 19 would use the app, but maybe by making those people more conscious even that could lower infection rates. If you'd like to see more about our project, check out this article on the Viget site!
MAKING BUBBEL
It was important to remember that we had a very limited amount of time to get Bubbel into development. Ideas like geolocation, signing up with email or phone number and visually showing “your bubble” with growing circles were simply not possible in that time frame. But there’s always version two! Iterations are on the way!
Brand Guide
Our brand attributes are:
-
Trustworthy and approachable
-
Responsible and playful
-
Proactive and informal
Mostly everything that has to do with Covid is stressful and clinical so we aimed at being serious but fun. For that reason, Bubbel's brand guide was literally inspired by bubbles! I searched bubble images and pulled colors from those. I leaned more towards blue tones as a nod to the medical and social nature of this site, but I also wanted to pull in fun accent colors like pink and purple. To make the logo, we layered circles of our chosen colors at a lowered opacity to play off of the bubble name and social bubble theme. Lastly, we chose more rounded sans-serif fonts like Work Sans and Open Sans to create a lighter feel in the text.
UX Layout
As seen above, the main flows of this site are onboarding, the profile and bubble view and recent activities. Here's a more in-depth look at how those pages work.
Prototyping
After the UX team finalized the designs and layout, the devs got to work! In one night they were able to get a good amount of the prototype up and running. It was almost magical to see them run through it at our sprint finale - I'd never seen something go from an idea to a fully realized prototype so quickly!
Insights and Testing
This was an extremely fast project! Initially we designed it without testing - we considered ourselves to be the target audience because we all could relate. However, after completing the first prototype, we forwarded it to our collective bubbles to see if this site was viable. We were met with rave reviews! Many people thought that this tool gave them an easy way to keep their daily interactions straight.
“It’s like excel for my social affairs…which I never thought I’d need.”
- Jeremy S.
More to Come...
Our sprint was incredibly successful, especially for my first one! It was nice to strip away all of the frills of this idea and focus on what was feasible in 48 hours. Even though we were able to get this idea prototyped in that short amount of time, we could've done a lot more if given more time. I hope one day we're able to fully flesh out this idea, even though by the time we get to do so the pandemic may be over.
The Team
Kate Trenerry, Copy/Brand Strategy
Tyler Berg, Design/UX
Emily Franey, PM/Copy
Pascale Georges, Brand Strategy
Elom Amouzou, Design
Amy Townsend, Front-End Developer
Ashley Pollard, Front-End Developer
Kate Frohbose, Design/UX
Problem
Opportunity
Bubbel How it Works
Bubbel UX
bottom of page