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Design a product that informs people about the Coronavirus.

  • Related to Product Design
  • For Generalist PM
  Google
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Answers (1)

(Disclaimer: There’s a lot of companies already working towards this and there’s the Google/Apple collab out there so of course my answers will have overlap with them because IMO the approach makes sense, what I’ll focus on is the why )

About corona

Corona virus or covid-19 is a new strain of virus that’s extremely infectitious and is spread via contact(direct/indirect) and airborne sometimes via fluids say from cough or sneezing.

Why does it need a solution

Dangerous because

1) Infection rate: Very infectitious since it can be spread via people contact/airborne fluids(sneeze cough) or through infected surfaces

2) Patient become passive carriers : People who are infected may take upto a week before they start showing

the above 2 combines means that it spreads exponentially and can easily exhaust/break the health infra of a country beyond its capacity

Whats the solution to 

We can break down the covid 19 solution into 3 parts

  • Pre-infection – goal is prevent spread by spreading info about:
    • About the disease:
    • Best prevention practices: What to do and how to do (including where to buy products if any are needed)
    • Prevent misinformation/panic: Share relevant info from reliable sources
    • Detection: How to spot symptoms in people around you/ on you
  • During infection: goal is identify quickly and trace risk people and test to prevent further spread
    • Symptoms to self diagnose (reliable but accurate enough to minimise false negatives) – here I’ve chosen false negatives since given the infection rate + ability of some people to not show symptoms its better to minimise false negatives than false positives
    • Where to go: There are special hospitals for this, which hospitals/helpline numbers, insurance related info
    • identify 2nd degrees of infection: Who did the patient come in contact with, trace them and repeat exercise till youve identifies all risk individuals
  • post infection
    • info: When can you step out
    • Dos and don’t
    • Symptoms to pay attention to (post treatment FAQs)

Clarification

What do you mean product? 

I’m assuming you mean a digital product, there are different choices available but we want to optimise for reach – a phone product to be specific given it’s distribution and ability to reach individuals at sale if requireds

Who’s building this?

Not specified so I’ll focus on the ideal requirements and figure out who should build this

Customers?

2 sided story – authority and pubilc

authorities needs 

  • Prevent spread
  • Prevent panic/misinformation
  • Enforce lockdown
  • Identify patients quickly
  • contact tracing Once patient identified trace the contacts theyve had and test them

public

  • Find reliable information on how to prevent and diagnosis
  • Find products they need to prevent ( masks/sanitiser etc)
  • Find information about their area
  • Find the latest news from authorities – dos and don’ts FAQ, help line, where to go for testing
  • Find out if theyve been in a risk area/risk contact + what to do next
  • Not have their privacy compromised
through the product we wont be able to solve for the actual test itself
So at a broad level
we need to be able to (at a product level)
  • Share prevention info, symptoms and test centers info with Public: Share generic/persinalised verified information from reliable sources with population
    • how to prevent: what you need to do, what you need – where to buy
    • news about the area: infections, where, where to go tests, helpline
    • FAQs
  • Help authoriries Identify potential infections quickly: Reach out to people who are at risk( potentially in contact with infected patient or in a high risk area) basis data available
    • Do this at scale without compromising identities: We need to ensure we are covering as much of the population as possible while ensuring privacy – this can be used for harm by bad actors or misused for targeting without permission
At a mechanics level we need to be able to do 3 things
1) identify reliable sources of info: personalise it to user is necessary
2) Identify who all the users came in contact with
3) identify effectiveness of lockdown/where are people not following so govt can correct it
for 2/3 given the requirement and scale we have 2 approaches:
1) A 3rd party builds it : open source API that any developer can plug their app into and build on it
2) Do it at an OS level: Google/apple, any developer can plug in
I’ll choose the latter given that the first approach may not be as secure and may not be able to prevent access to bad actors as effectively as the same being done at an OS level where its much harder to manipulate the data.
  • Use proxy identifiers: We cannot leak identities of users however we can give a variable identifier to each phone that expire after some time
  • identify using blue tooth: NFC range is too limited and wifi is too broad+consumes more power, low energy bluetooth can be used to identify connection and strength can be used to identify proximity (physical barriers reduce signal strength and hence can be used to calculate risk)
issues OSs will need to solve for is primarily update and ensure access to the right authorities:
1) Update: Apple typically has really good update rates, they can take a very aggressive update push + make the update size very small to ensure people update right away. Google has built the abilitiy to push updates via playstore so we can leverage that.
The app can be part of the update and that way anybody can use it and youll get fantastic coverage quickly instead of fragmentation due to coverage of apps who use it.
2) Access control: Google/apple can issue guidelines on who can use it and who can’t and the process for the same.