Tracking the Symptoms of Long Covid
About the client
The University of the West of Scotland is a modern, career-focused university with roots reaching back to 1897 and five campuses spanning Paisley, Ayr, Dumfries, Lanarkshire and London. Ranked among the world’s top young universities by Times Higher Education, UWS aligns its teaching and research with the priorities of business, government and the communities it serves.
Its work in health, sport and exercise science is a particular strength, with researchers delivering applied studies designed to change practice in the real world — from clinical settings to schools and workplaces.
The challenge
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 wanted a platform to capture detailed information from people who had contracted Covid-19 and were living with the symptoms of Long Covid.
The research team wanted to understand whether everyone experienced the same symptoms, how severe they were, and which lasted longest — with particular interest in people who never became seriously ill with Covid-19 or needed hospital care. The project was collectively funded by the University of the West of Scotland, the Chief Scientist Office and NHS Scotland.
Our challenge was to devise a data-capture system that advanced on the first project, using deeper conditional logic so that participants only ever saw questions relevant to their previous answers.
Our approach
We revisited the design system from the first UWS website and updated it towards a more modern, bolder interface. The project’s success rested on the questions, structure and conditional logic making sense to both participants and researchers, so we worked closely with the UWS project team to keep the data capture as simple to follow as possible.
We designed the interface as a multi-step form, using embedded repeaters to capture initial participant information that is then used to auto-generate new sections of questions later in the form. Participants could also add fields on the fly, recording ailments and symptoms the design process had not anticipated.
Here is one step, showing the option to add additional symptoms:
An excellent collaboration — and research whose publications should help us all better understand how Covid-19 affects public health over the medium and long term.
What we delivered
Project details
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