The COVID pandemic in 2020 saw a race of who could offer COVID travel tests fastest to capture market share for a crazy, one-off market that had a shelf life of anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. 


Our agency was approached with the task of designing and building a service in 2 weeks that could adapt to rapidly changing international travel requirements while gaining trust of visitors, launching in the U.S. and UK. Our team consisted of 2 PMs, 2 Devs and myself as the Product Designer.

I rebranded and redesigned their front end UI & UX all the way from the Top of Funnel marketing page, through checkout, to submitting your test results online, increasing conversion by 64%.

Qured needed a trustworthy, friendly UX that could win over the competition. It needed to be able to plug into their backend systems for delivering, receiving and evaluating test results in a flexible way that could change with new regulatory requirements that were coming in every week.

The first product goal was to maximise conversion from the landing page. This required a laser focus on building trust, ensuring the steps were easy to understand, and educating the user on what tests they need. Every component was wireframed from the ground up with a focus on clarity, guidance and transparency.

There were many UX patterns that could have been used for solving this problem. The main challenge was in catering to all the different User Scenarios, as well as trying to upsell video appointments and later down the line, understanding whether the user was vaccinated or not.

The first design we explored was based on some boutique D2C User Journeys. We prototyped the journey, and while it was a nice experience, it struggled with figuring out what tests users needed for complicated or multi- leg journeys.

This was the most flexible and familiar UX for users, who will have done something similar to book their flights. The problem in the end was one of feasibility. Because every day lost Qured significant market share, we needed something simpler that wasn’t dependent on complicated backend functionality.

The UX we decided on in the end was simpler and put some of the onus on the user to figure out what tests they needed. We found people were generally capable of googling whether they needed an LFD or PCR test for their flight, which saved us building a backend service that would require lots of maintenance. The UK brought in around this time a traffic light system for travel which helped guide users too.

The requirements here were complex and needed to tie into their logistical supply chain. The kit registration needed to understand who you were submitting tests for, what flight you were getting, as well as align with regulations on isolation on your return.

We tested our prototypes internally before release, and for the most part were adopted successfully by users. Because they needed to get live and because of changing regulatory requirements, the test submission page ended up being a block paragraph of text guiding the user through what to do. This inevitably caused lots of issues for users submitting their tests at a very delicate time (within 12 hours of their flight!).

Once live, we setup a workshop with Qured’s Customer Success Team to understand where all the issues were for users. We focused on the main blockers and ideated on ways to solve them. You can see some of the details of the workshop in an article I wrote, ‘The mistakes everyone makes when running a workshop’.

I managed to design Qured from the ground up over a period of 2 weeks. I purposefully haven’t included the brand explorations here, because I only had a day or two to do them and I wouldn’t wish that upon any designer. Regardless, I’m proud of how it came out and it was amazing to design and launch something so quickly. The immediate feedback loop with users was effective and great fun.