Saúde Já

In the first months of 2017, I was working in a company that built lots of different projects for governmental institutions here in Brazil.

This place was a very old-fashioned environment for product development, which meant working with Photoshop CS3, building wireframes with PowerPoint, and lots of unhealthy things such as being forbidden to talk to users and do research.

Amongst all these things, there were lots of opportunities to have an actual impact on people’s lives with technology. A very rare opportunity.

This post talks about one of these apps and how it was created. Curitiba, one of the state capitals of Brazil, public health app: Saúde Já

The beginning

While working at this company that served a lot of governmental institutions, we had a big project with the city of Curitiba that connected directly to the public health system’s database.

This project was called “e-Vida” and had several working features within it such as appointment scheduling, emergency care, family vaccination card, dental care, and lots more to the point the app was overkill.

My purpose at this point was to organize the app’s navigation hierarchy, build the wireframes, discuss them exclusively with internal stakeholders, build screens, and support development with quality control.

At the time, Curitiba had a political turn in the 2016’s elections and that project got greenlit. This meant some people who were working on this project migrated to another company where the real app would be developed.

Saúde Já development

While we settled into this new company, a team was assembled to build this app as quickly as it took. Other than management, we were 1 designer and 4 developers who had carte blanche to define the processes and tools we needed to deliver this project.

This was kind of a relief since I wasn’t stuck anymore to using photoshop and saw an opportunity to try out using Figma in a real-world project for the first time.

In 2 months with a lot of overtime work, we were able to:

• Review the scope of what Saúde Já would be, making the app less than a tenth of what the original “e-Vida” was. In hindsight, I feel this was the best decision possible but at the time I was kind of bummed because I knew what the people of Curitiba could’ve received.
• Create a new set of screens thinking about the experience from an Android first point of view.
• Adjust screens to the Saúde Já’s logo we received.
• Test and refine all the developed screens.

I also couldn’t talk about this project and not talk about building for the reality of my country. Especially when thinking about a product that will serve the general public, designers should use Android as the starting point for every project. If in 2017 the reality was already an overwhelming market share by Android devices, nowadays it is even bigger.

The app got launched. It wasn’t a huge success or a big major topic in the city’s population, but I eventually received some photos from some friends that saw billboards across the city. I was quite happy with being the person responsible for creating this even though the process was far from what I ideally imagined.

After launch, I put together a presentation proposing how current digital design processes and frameworks could change the way the company built products.

The award

After launch, Saúde Já won the LATAM Smart City Award 2018 in the Digital Transformation category.

The award recognized the product our small team of one designer and four developers designed, built, and shipped in two months.