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Designing Engagement & Data Quality in a Large-Scale Epidemiological Simulation
"I led the UX and product design efforts to redesign the mobile experience — focusing on engagement, usability, and data reliability — to support both scientific research and large-scale participant."
Operation Outbreak (OO) is an epidemiological education and research platform that uses a mobile app (iOS and Android) to spread a fictional pathogen via Bluetooth across participating phones, offering a low-stakes simulation of a high-stakes scenario.
The project began as an in-person classroom experiment in 2017 and evolved into a digital platform in 2019. However, the early digital version struggled to translate the physical experience into an engaging, scalable product.
Transformed the classroom-based simulation into a fully digital experience designed to keep students engaged while producing high-quality research data. This included redesigning 4 core features, introducing 2 new features, building the gamification system, reworking the full UI, and improving the onboarding and login flow to better support simulation participation.
The first digital version provided basic functionality, but the user drop rate was very high (85.6%) and very quick after onboarding. To understand why engagement dropped so quickly, I conducted user research through surveys, workshops, and field observations. These insights informed the redesign strategy and feature prioritization, and aligned direction and timeline.
The original digital experience struggled with:
For researchers, this meant: incomplete datasets, noisy or unreliable contact data, difficulty modeling real-world transmission patterns.
help users understand their role in the simulation and how their actions influence outcomes
Solutions I redesigned the Statistics & Feedback system to make abstract epidemiological data understandable and actionable.
Users could: view their contact history, understand risk exposure, track symptoms and behaviors, make informed decisions during the simulation.
Also the app integrated epidemiology quizzes to reinforce learning and improve engagement.
The problem The original app had only 3 main screens and little explanatory content. Users couldn't understand why their actions mattered.
extend user engagement from short sessions to sustained participation across a 2 week simulation
Key Mechanics: point system tied to behaviors, avatar health states, resource tradeoffs (PPE, quarantine, testing), daily decision loops, reward & consequence modeling. Rather than "playing a game," users experienced the real-world tradeoffs of public health decisions.
The problem User motivation dropped quickly, reducing participation and data reliability. I designed a gamification system aligned with research goals, informed by a collaborative workshop and pre-sim user testing.
streamline the OO digital experience by guiding users more clearly from instruction to execution
The original UI felt rigid, overly technical, and difficult to navigate.
I redesigned the UI to reduce cognitive load, improve clarity, and create a more approachable and consistent experience across the system. This included a refreshed visual identity, cleaner layouts, an improved color system, and reorganized navigation to make content easier to explore and understand.
These redesign successfully supported the largest and longest Operation Outbreak simulation to date (11/2023), achieved 80% user satisfaction in post-study surveys, improved engagement and retention across the simulation period, from 45 mins to 2 weeks long participation, improved data reliability by 62% , that support researchers in training the prediction model to closely mirror real outbreak patterns.
Additional contributions:
Status Update: I also designed early prototypes for the OO admin dashboard used to set up and manage simulations. While ongoing development is now led by the Fathom design team, my original design content and userflows informed the current implementation. You can view my design version of the OO dashboard here.
Here will show some group photos with different teams, and users playing the games.