Booking clinical resources
A scheduling interface for customer service agents to book clinical resources for customers.
Employee vaccination submission portal
- role
- Design lead
- interface
- Responsive
- team
- 5
- duration
- 2 months
- employer
- Lifeworks
- industry
- Health
I led a rapid product-design effort to explore an employee vaccination submission portal for LifeWorks. As employers looked for ways to manage changing COVID-19 policies, our small feature team used research and design prototypes to explore the business opportunity and sell to clients. Early testing helped us identify whether the opportunity justified a full build.
Table of contents
Defining the opportunity
1
An Employee Assistance Program (EAP) is a voluntary, work-based benefit that provides employees with confidential, free, and short-term support for personal or work-related issues affecting their well-being and job performance.
- Core Services:
- Short-term mental health counselling, crisis intervention, financial advice, legal consultations, and assistance with child/elder care referrals or substance abuse.
- Cost & Access:
- Fully funded by the employer—services are typically free to employees and often extend to immediate family members.
- Strict Confidentiality:
- By law and policy, employers receive only aggregated usage statistics and never know who uses the service or what was discussed.
- Purpose:
- To help employees navigate life stressors before they escalate into severe personal, health, or workplace performance challenges.
As design lead, I took the initial requirements from our product team and conducted a rapid competitive review, identified the emerging interaction patterns around vaccination status and document submission, and translated them into an MVP concept. The prototype gave stakeholders and clients something concrete to evaluate while product and engineering assessed feasibility and cost.
This was a time sensitive product opportunity, and relied on a quick turn around. Could we create a trustworthy, low-friction workflow quickly enough to meet a temporary market need, and would clients value and rely on it enough to justify building and maintaining it?
☆ Bit of a spoiler, dear reader, but you lived through COVID-19
—what do you think happened? Weird times.
SIDE NOTES
During COVID-19 there was a lot of mandated software the people had to use. Those products had already defined certain heuristics and interaction patterns.
Note to say they were all the same or all correct but when it made sense to align we did our best to do so.
We payed special attention to provincial government documents and ArriveCan (yes that one) aligning closely with the language and document flows.
Designing the experience
2
The portal needed to do one job well: help an employee submit their vaccine information correctly and quickly. We deliberately limited the feature set and organised the experience around a short, guided form with a lightweight dashboard for resolving errors, essentially an auditing UI for progress and history.
In addition to the end-user functionality, we also made every effort not to introduce additional administrative overhead (help tickets, uncertainty queries, etc.). I conducted a brief but extensive service-design breakdown to identify any areas that could introduce these unintentional administrative burdens.
Design priorities
- Make the experience as accessible as possible
- Keep the workflow focused on submission
- Provide guidance at ambiguous decision points
- Design for mobile as the primary interface (via email link)
- Borrow UX heuristics from existing government platforms where and when it made sense
Guidance at the point of uncertainty
COVID-19 policies were always changing, and there was no consistent vaccination document across jurisdictions. We gathered provincial and federal resources and placed help beside the decisions where users were most likely to get confused, and potentially quite the journey.
The proposed content model for these help resources used an actively managed CDN, so examples and official guidance could be updated, without waiting for a product release. Showing requirements before the form began also made the time commitment clearer, and reduced the chance of an incomplete submission.
Guidance throughout the submission
We explained the required documents and time commitment before the user began, helping them complete the task in one attempt.
Optimise the common path
We optimised the workflow for the most common submissions while preserving flexibility for less common cases. Quick-select options covered common vaccine brands, and users could prefill information from previous doses. The result was a focused mobile flow that still accommodated regional and individual differences.
Outcome and impact
3
The prototype did its job even though the product was never built. As public discourse and employer policies evolved, clients became less willing to accept the perceived risks of mandatory bodily monitoring of employees. The business decided that the potential revenue no longer justified the implementation and maintenance costs.
The prototype helped the business test the opportunity, communicate its response to clients, and avoid committing significant time and money to a shrinking market.
The design team built leverage with the larger organisation, demonstrating our value and effectiveness in exploring early product offerings and markets.
Organisational outcomes
- Demonstrated how design can help assess market viability before committing
- Showed clients that the team could respond quickly to emerging needs
- Created interaction patterns that the broader UX team could reuse
- Avoided investing heavily in a product whose market opportunity was already declining
Other work