A team of young software developers have built a new vaccine booking website, after becoming frustrated by the user interface on the official government one.
Ilia Sidorenko, one of the team of eight, said they noticed people were having trouble finding the soonest available booking through the official vaccine booking website.
The problem was the interface required a user to select an individual clinic before showing appointment times, making it a slow and cumbersome process to find the soonest possible booking across a range of sites.
To fix this, the group built a website that shows all available slots in a region on an easy-to-use calendar, rather than having to look at each vaccination clinic individually.
“It’s really hard to go venue by venue on the official website and so we decided to completely invert that user flow, and offer the calendar view,” Sidorenko said.
“The Ministry of Health has done 95% of the hard work and we are just filling in a user interface/user experience gap”.
The website, Vaxx.nz, has already attracted more than 4,000 users since it went live on Sunday, and has seen an average of 500 users every 30 minutes throughout Monday morning.
On social media, many people are reporting being able to bring their vaccination appointment forward by up to three weeks.
Vaxx.nz redirects you to the government website to complete the booking.
Sidorenko told BusinessDesk he thought this would help reduce vaccine wastage and speed up the vaccination process, as people were more easily able to fill all empty slots instead of waiting weeks for an opening at a specific clinic.
The website attracted praise on LinkedIn from the co-founder of software firm Company-X and a lead customer experience designer at Vodafone NZ.
It was built over the past week by a group of friends – Walter Lim, Ilia Sidorenko, Minh Phu Lai, Molly Derecourt, Jackson Lawrence, Matt Weston, William Seagar, and Olaf Wrieden – who have competed in software competitions together.
