Sanitized mobility to reduce commute friction for COVID-19 frontline workers.

With a motive to serve the society during the pandemic, Swiftride(Toronto based mobility startup) is creating a friction-less commute solution for frontline workers. 'Heropool' helps plan daily rides based on work shifts.
We won the First prize at TogetherVsVirus 2020 and Semi-finalist at Hack the Curve Canada-wide hackathons, for proposing a promising solution to reduce understaffing at care home facilities

Role and Assets: Product Strategy, Visual Design, Onboarding Documentation, Usability Testing



Problem Discovery

One of the most heart breaking news during the COVID19 crisis is the number of deaths of elderly people at care home facilities. Not only the deaths but also the fact that residents were suffering from lack of personalized care due to severe under staffing, nationwide.
When we saw Dr Theresa Tam announced in April, that almost half of Canadian Coronavirus deaths are happening in care homes, we decided to volunteer in some way to provide support for these elderly residents.
How I joined the Swiftride Taskforce

The team at Swiftride, reached out to managers working at care home facilities to understand the reasons for understaffing, as we felt deep down that public transportation would be a major concern. From our interviews with the managers, it became evident that the frontline staff though willing to help, were concerned with the following:

  • lack of flexibility of public commute
  • fear of the risk of getting infected in public commute

Problem Definition

Having understood the underlying challenges, the team at Swiftride put the current application development on hold and started planning for a service - to provide safe, reliable and flexible transportation. Something that would bring back frontline workers safely to their place of work

Example Personas in COVID Scenarios:

Anna Koutsonikolas is a Care facility nurse who is efficient at taking care of elderly people. She has been in this service for over 20 years and knows how to tackle any kind of situation. Living in the suburbs of Toronto, she needs to take public commute that runs for over 45 minutes each time. Considering her age and the current COVID on the rise, she is reluctant to take the risk of daily public commute. This has made her reduce her number of shifts from 12 times a week to 4 times a week.

Prem Kumar is an Emergency care Doctor. He drives to work everyday for over 20 minutes in his car. During the COVID he has been taking extra care to sanitize his vehicle at the end of every workday. He works atleast 8 shifts a week. He would be more than willing to pick or drop someone from work, who works around his timings.

Kevin Jones is a student from the University of Toronto. He is currently relaxing indoors during the summer holidays. He is a licensed driver and would love for an opportunity to volunteer in any way to support in the fight again COVID.

The Idea behind the Application:

We came to the consensus to build a carpooling platform for the pool of frontline workers, that abides by the current riding restrictions, across the nation. Keeping this as the base, we planned on a ride pairing solution to be flexible, optimally priced and sanitized.
Heropool is a ride pairing platform that matches a frontline worker looking for a ride with a frontline worker to drive a common route.

How Fronline workers could use it:

Building this internal commute network makes the whole daily commute more organized and safe. Incase of hiring volunteers, we planned to screen the eligible candidates and make a volunteer pool. These volunteers would fill in for the frontline workers who do not have a matching ride. We had planned the following to ensure that our volunteers and frontline workers have a safe commute:
- A trial partnership a car cleaning service provider to provide sanitation services.
- Provide each driver with PPE at a central location before passenger pick up.

The Heropool Benefit:

Zero cost service for daily commute of frontline workers
Flexibility in commute with minimal waiting time
Guaranteed Sanitation helping solve the concern for easy virus spread
Reliable Commute Network with your own work colleagues

Prototype and Features







One Step Account Registration

The goal is to make the registration process as simple and quick as possible. The system works such that onlythe phone number is sufficient to log into the account and schedule/check their rides. There are 3 account choices as in Fronline worker willing to drive, Frontline worker looking for a ride, Volunteer Driver

Ride-pairing algorithm based on work shift timings

The Fronline workers and volunteers can enter their daily shift schedule into the application. The algorithm is automater to run every 6 hours and can pair rides based on nearest location and similar work shift timings.

Ride status and ensuring Vehicle Sanitization

The application has a mechanism to Accept ride pickups/drops. Upon agreeing for a pickup, the ride reflects on the interface as a scheduled ride. The worker/volunteer picking up needs to confirm on the Sanitization activity. While there is no facility to monitor the same, it is simply a reminder to keep the cleanliness in check.



Learnings

We've just launched ourservice with 1 elderly care facility and are keen to hear from them on how it is helping their staffs. Apart from that, these are some learnings during the process.
- Useful ideas can shape up so well in something as quick as a Hackathon (2 week Sprint) when you have great set of people with different expertise
- Its a good idea to keep the interface as simple as possible while building application services that made for usage in emergency situations and by people who are not involved with high tech usage.
- While mentors really help in giving direction on the impact of the product in any industry, it is best to run usability testing and customer feedback reviews to understand the real impact.

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