After the success of our first project for UWS we were commissioned to build a second website, this one more complex than the first. Professor Sculthorpe was keen to create a website that could be used to capture relevant information from those who had caught Covid-19 and were dealing with the symptoms of Long Covid.
The team of researchers involved in the project were keen to understand if everyone had the same symptoms, how bad the symptoms were, or which symptoms were lasting the longest. They were particularly interested in the ongoing symptoms of people who never became seriously ill with COVID-19, that is, people who did not need to go to hospital because of the infection. This project was also collectively funded by the University of the West of Scotland, Chief Scientist Office and NHS Scotland.
The challenge for Tecology for this project was to devise a complex data capture system that advanced on the first project to include more advanced conditional logic so that users were only displayed questions based on their answers.
For this project, we revisited the design system used for the first UWS website and updated it slightly to reflect a more modern, bolder UI. The key to the success of this project was to ensure that all of the Questions, structure and conditional logic made sense for both the user and the researchers. We worked extensively with the project team at UWS to ensure, from an end-user perspective, that the data capture was as simple and easy to follow as possible.
We designed the interface as a multi-step form and used embedded repeaters to capture the initial user information which is then used later in the form to autogenerate new sections of questions. Users could also add in additional fields ‘on-the-fly’ to include ailments and symptoms that had not been considered in the design process.
Here is an example of one step which includes the option to include additional symptoms:
This was an excellent project to collaborate on and we look forward to seeing the benefit to UWS and the associated research publications which will hopefully help us all understand better how Covid-19 is affecting public health in the medium to long term.
