Most weeks, I start writing my post on Friday, finish it on Saturday, and then edit it on Sunday.
This week, I’m writing live and spontaneous, sitting down to fulfill my commitment to this project, but absent of the time I’d like to do it well.
Most everyone knows I’m a design researcher at Walgreens. Usually, my job provides excellent work-life balance that leaves me time to pursue other interests, but this last week I’ve fallen head-first into the maelstrom of the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out. Specifically, I’m working to understand the difficulties people are having using our online tools to schedule COVID tests and vaccine appointments. If anyone reading this has happened to use either of these tools and has had a bad time of it, I’d appreciate hearing about your experience.
I’m glad to be a conduit between the people using these tools and the people designing them. It’s given me a firsthand, real-time view of how tiny design decisions can make such differences for people who are trying to get vaccinated.
I don’t think I was prepared for just how emotional this experience would be. There are moms staying up all night refreshing the appointments page hoping to find a slot for their elderly parents to get vaccinated. There are professionals who can’t return to work until they get a COVID test who can’t get past steps in the process because it’s not clear which fields on a form are mandatory and which are optional. There are people who are being told they’re not eligible for the vaccine in their state when they actually are all because the eligibility requirements are listed next to state abbreviations and “OH” is so easily confused with “OR” at a glance. Hearing these stories and watching the macro consequences of design minutia tugs the heart as much as it taxes the mind.
But the work is also exciting, energizing, and meaningful, and I feel grateful to be able to play such a small part.
On a completely unrelated note, I think it’s always better to say “thank you” than “I’m sorry.” So many people have been through such challenging trials this last year. So whether you’ve grown depressed from being isolated at home, or you’re angry about politics, or beset by emergencies, I just want to say that I’m grateful that you’ve made it to today.
Thank you all for persisting.
And now, because it’s snowy and cold, a stanza from John Donne that always warms my heart:
Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.
May you all, despite the cold, feel somewhere inside the stirrings of the next world, that is, this next spring.
Until next week,
Josh