Health Pass

CLEAR

As the second product design hire at CLEAR, I was the lead designer of our Health Pass product, where we quickly pivoted from a travel-focused mobile app to a COVID-19 health screening tool. We launched three significant product versions and helped CLEAR become an industry leader in COVID-19 health screening technology by combining a user's digital identity with critical health insights like lab testing results.

During this time, the company also grew rapidly, with the cross-functional Health Pass team going from 10 to over 60 people and the design team growing from two to over 12. I will be part of the Health Pass team from April 2020 to January 2022. The following case study will focus on covering the initial concept to launch and highlighting a few key product features designed for the final version of the product.

Concept

When the pandemic shut down travel in mid-March 2020, CLEAR looked to pivot quickly as nearly all of the usage for our travel-focused products went to zero. The company made a strategic bet that once lockdowns were lifted, people would want to meet in person again safely.

The mobile team was tasked with building a product experience that combined CLEAR's digital identity and then augmented it with health insights like temperature data and health screening questions.

I worked quickly with my product manager and ideated how to deliver this experience by leveraging what already existed. The image above shows a sketch where the lower fidelity wireframes represented all the net new components needed to be built.

At the same time, working with the only other designer, we created a few high-level customer journey maps based on our assumptions of Health Pass's most likely use cases. We would eventually validate some of these later on through user research.

Alpha version

For the initial version of Health Pass, we worked on building an experience where the user would go through a liner flow, where after they have successfully verified their identity, they would answer a few health screening questions at home and then have their temperature taken by CLEAR’s hardware device before being allowed entry into an in-person space.

In this experience, one of the most critical screens was the final results page, letting the user and others know if they could safely enter a location. The image above shows a few iterations of the design, where I experimented with different hierarchies and visual cues to help inform if the user could enter a location.

As we were building this product out, we realized there was an internal need it could help fulfill. As CLEAR’s primary business involves running security screening lanes at airports around the country, we had employees who didn’t have a safe, easy way to complete COVID-19 health screenings before going to work in person at those airports. We launched an internal pilot of Health Pass with our airport employees, enabling us to quickly test, solicit feedback, and iterate the product based on actual users.

I landed on the final design of the results screen, which adopted a color palette that reflected a traffic light where each color would represent a different risk potential of potentially spreading COVID-19. I also included a QR code, which enabled a companion app for security guards to use and scan to verify the results and also offered an accessible way to confirm information without needing to interpret the colors visually.

First launch

We launched the first public version of Health Pass for the Stanley Cup Playoffs, where players and staff would utilize Health Pass as their daily health screening tool to maintain a two-month quarantine bubble. During that time, no one got COVID-19, and the NHL was one of the first major US sports leagues to resume their games.

Overview

With the success of Health Pass for the NHL, we knew we had something special and worked quickly to build new features to support more use cases. We launched version two with our first consumer-focused Health Pass features to help fans safely return to NBA games. For organizations, we also modularized the screening experience. Hence, organizations like the NBA could customize what kind of health screenings they wanted at different locations based on local regulations. For version three, the final major iteration of the product, vaccinations, was added as a health screening option.

Vaccinations

One of the biggest challenges I faced when working on Health Pass was designing the user experience to add their vaccination data. In the US, there were no centralized national databases we could leverage. Because the government was the primary way most people were vaccinated, I created an experience primarily driven by the state where a user was vaccinated for the initial designs. The image above shows what this initial experience looked like; for some states, CLEAR could leverage the state vaccination registry, and for other states where we had no data, we could only include vaccinations done at significant pharmacies like Walmart.

Another challenge I needed to solve was that people were only considered fully vaccinated if they completed all the doses and finished the waiting time required by the CDC for the vaccine they received. To solve this, I iterated through a few design options shown above. I landed on leveraging this idea of using a mental model of a timeline and anchoring people's vaccination experience on that. During this time, CLEAR was also going through a rebrand, and I worked on pressure testing the new design language and UI components in this project.

For the final designs, I scraped the state-based experience and created a screen where users can select how they want to upload their data. After we launched this, most users took a picture of their CDC card, where CLEAR verified the authenticity through ML models and added their vaccination data.

Example Health Pass Flow

Users started their Health Pass by selecting where they were looking to use it.

Users are presented with an entry requirement checklist that walks users through the screening requirements. The requirements shown are customizable by the organization managing that location. In this case, they must add their vaccination and complete an onsite lab test.

After completing the screening requirements, users will be presented with a completed Health Pass that they may visually show to gain entry to the location. CLEAR also provided organizations with daily reporting data on Health Pass usage. All screening results were kept private; only the Health Pass color would be shared.

Results

With Health Pass, we were able to help major sporting events and large conferences, and employees return to in-person gatherings again. Health Pass has been used over 10 million times, and the iOS app maintains a 4.7 average review on the App Store.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/coming-vaccine-passports-aim-for-simplicity-11615922205

https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-news/clear-health-pass-hawaii