2020 has been a chaos for everyone. Covid has struck really bad and we are still recovering. During this pandemic, traveling was one of the toughest tasks for anyone. There are restrictions for movement inside the city and public transports are off. Government new systems such as e-Pass (travel pass for inter & intra state travel), Arogya Setu (Covid tracker) app for travellers.

Another thing that i found interesting is that every shop had this registry where the customers are required to write down their details (Name, Address & Phone number) during every visit. Very few shops had someone writing down these details for the customers but 95% of them asked the customers to write it down. The customers are given a shared Pen and Registry to enter these details. Sharing a pen/paper, for me, i felt this was not very safe. But i was curious to understand how this is helping the government. After meeting with a government official, we got to know that this registry helps them to track a particular shop and the customers if at all there is a new case nearby or related to the shop. They validate these records manually once every week or sometimes they don't do it at all. Some shops have stopped using these records as customers were reluctant to fill these information and maintaining these records for them was hard as well.

I spoke with my friend Prabhakaran and he resonated the same. He was traveling outside of India and during his shopping spree he had to write down his details in multiple shops. And at times there was a big queue for writing this information before the billing counter.

This pandemic as i see will be there for some more time and rules like these will help the government as well as the people to prepare for current and future pandemics. But from where i stand, the current process and the data available can be utilized in a much better way.

Observations:

We spoke with few customers and shopkeepers to understand the pain points. Most of them felt this as an issue. Customers had issues using the shared pen or waiting in line to update the registry or writing their details in a public registry. While shopkeepers had to maintain these data.

We also found that the information given by the customers are sometimes not legible nor authentic. It was hard for the government officials to track back the customer.
It is an interesting problem in hand with pain points that i can totally relate to with other customers. We were curious to address this problem and define a solution for the same. We started writing down all the observations and data we had received from multiple sources.

Our 3 obvious target users were;
1. Customers,
2. Shopkeepers &
3. Government officials.

Expected outcomes

• Simplify check-in for users

• Contact less registry at the shop &

• Ease of data collection and processing for govt. officials.

First thoughts & Possible solutions

First thought that came into our head was to remove this manual entry process in the registry. There were multiple options here but mobile check-in seemed to be an easier option. This data needs to be super secured and building an app at that scale would be tough as well.

We started identifying existing products and solutions and circled down to Aarogya setu app and Aadhaar card. Aadhaar is a govt. id with user data such as name, address and phone number. Though Aarogya setu is a mandated app, it doesn’t have much of the user data, it only has the ability to identify nearby cases.

We thought connecting these two would solve most of the issues here.

1. For customers: They can use either Aadhar/Aarogya setu app for a contact less check-in and the data is secured as well.

2. The data would be authentic and can be pulled from govt. records.

3. Govt. officials doesn’t have to visit the shop to validate or collect the data.

4. Shopkeepers doesn’t have to maintain a manual registry.

What about people without phones? That did come across our mind. We took an assumption that most people have Aadhaar. Aadhaar has a QR code which carries all of the required information. Our assumptions were that the shopkeeper can scan the aadhar if a customer doesn’t have mobile phone. And if the user doesn’t have both mobile or Aadhaar, then they can use the shop registry.

With our preliminary thoughts and assumptions we moved to the next step. We wanted to connect these dots.

For customers and shopkeepers, its one way flow. Government officials can collect the information from both Customers and Shopkeepers.
This would help them better to build a timeline and retrace steps for an infected patient or if a store is infected they could go back and find all the customers visited the store and contact them directly.

This certainly makes the data collection easier and it also puts the data into use(which i will be covering in Part 2).

Continuation in Part 2...