UX: Show appointment history to build user confidence

[johnhawkinson]

At this morning's standup, Liv noted that she's been getting a lot of site user feedback that whenever they go to the site, they see there are no appointments available, and thus conclude our site is just as bad as Vaxfinder.

The answer of course is that there were appointments available, but they disappeared almost as fast as they are available.

My take on this is that therefore we should endeavor to design the user experience so they know that we did have vaccine appointments yesterday, and some way to show how many. This is with the purpose of building confidence (aka implying that we will have more in the future).

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There are a lot of different ways to approach that, here are some:

1. When we show a site with no available appointments (or even one with!), give a list of how many historical appointments we knew about. E.g. ... Feb 21 previously had 800 appointments here. Feb 22 previously had 1,000 appointments here.

2. We could try to do that in some way that shows rate (first derivative of appointments) rather than just raw. This might imagine predictions like, "On the average, one new appointment appears every {10 minutes}." That could be either on a per-site basis or overall.

3. We can make a change to the No Appointments Available box. Instead of showing complex multivariate data (which I am biased in favor of!), we could show something much simpler: "In the past 24 hours, we showed 700 appointments available." with the implication of "Keep checking back for more."

4. We could visualize appointment histories. As I said on the Slack on Friday, "I never would have thought of a map with inline sparkline graphs of availability history for each site, without having seen this (from your link):"

   

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The above list is not intended to be exhaustive, or even suggested. It can probably be much-improved upon. Please do so!

[j256]

I would think showing the users all of the sites that we scrape would give additional assurance. Seeing a grid like:

Site Name	Slots open Last 24 Hours	Last Open Time	Last Checked
Gilette	150	4:25 pm	3 minutes ago
Malden CVS	10	Yesterday	1 minute ago

...

This would show up only if the number of open slots and if the user expands some sort of details section at the bottom of the page. They could see the last-checked times changing often and get assurance that the site was doing something.

[jhalexand]

One thing that might be very helpful (though would also focus demand even more) could be a chart showing, for each category of site (e.g. State-run, CVS, Walgreens, basically one for each scraper type), the time of day that appointments historically become available. Something akin to the histograms that Google shows of "Popular times" when restaurants are the busiest. For example, google for "twyrl arlington" then scroll down to see it in the sidebar on the right. I could also imagine some sort of heatmap-style chart where the X-axis is the hour of the day and the Y-axis is the site type. Sorry that I don't have any experience with Node.

[ramon-h]

At this morning's standup, Liv noted that she's been getting a lot of site user feedback that whenever they go to the site, they see there are no appointments available, and thus conclude our site is just as bad as Vaxfinder.

Given that this is the issue you're trying to solve, the quickest and easiest solution to address that is probably to highlight testimonials from the GoFundMe campaign on the website. Knowing that the website worked well enough for other people that they were willing to donate their own money is a pretty powerful advocate for the website.

[livgust]

This issue is no longer relevant, as availability is up.