Developers strive to come up with the right user experience on coronavirus contact-tracing apps
By Ann-Marie Alcántara May 20, 2020 10:30 am ET When developers last month introduced Care19, an app to complement contact-tracing efforts in North Dakota and South Dakota during the coronavirus pandemic, they quickly encountered a problem: It sometimes showed users inaccurate information about the specific businesses they had visited.
“There’s some inherent uncertainty in the whole process,” said Tim Brookins, chief executive officer at ProudCrowd LLC, which developed Care19, referring to the app’s location-tracking technology. “We didn’t set the expectations properly.” In countries like the U.K. or Australia, which have developed or are developing countrywide apps for citizens to use, 56% of the population needs to download and use the app for it to be effective, said Jesse Colligan, a software engineer and spokesperson at Covid Watch, a nonprofit that created a exposure-notification app that was developed by researchers. Deploying apps to smaller targets such as workplaces may give them a better chance to get enough adoption to work well, Mr. Colligan said.
It will use colors to indicate risk levels in the vicinity, adjusted to reflect users’ relative vulnerability to the virus. The color orange, for example, has a set of guidelines for users to follow, such as congregating in groups of 20 people or less. The app may also show entire counties, cities and townships in a certain color.
CoEpi also is considering a more customized approach to exposure notification alerts, where a user could choose to be notified only if they were around someone who tested positive for the coronavirus for longer than 15 minutes, for example. The current default setting doesn’t put a minimum on exposure time.
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