26 November 2020
The global pandemic has created the need and opportunity for all sorts of smart innovations to flourish. One example is an app that monitors people’s compliance with their quarantines. I tried one out during my quarantine after relocating between continents; however, installing the app on my phone already came with a massive challenge. The application — primarily developed for people arriving from abroad — only ran on locally purchased phones, and people using foreign phones could not get the app working. It is not a unique example of how a genius idea can fall apart, because of the lack of consideration of the users’ context.