Public health · Crisis delivery

COVID Contact Tracing App

Leading the UX of Poland's national exposure-notification app during the first COVID-19 lockdown without sacrificing privacy to obtain certainty.

Read case study All projects

Key results

1.88M

officially documented downloads by March 2021

60+testers, doctors, ambassadors, and collaborators

45+developers and technical contributors

18 monthsof continuous crisis-driven delivery

2020–2021National-scale rollout

Project colophon

ProteGO Safe

Role: Lead UX/UI Designer
Engagement: 18 months
Scope: Business Analysis · UX/UI · Development
Tools: Adobe XD · Zeplin · MIRO

Areas of impact

ProteGO Safe began in the uncertainty of Poland's first COVID-19 lockdown. A small team built an early Bluetooth-based prototype at a moment when exposure-notification products had no established playbook. The Polish government recognized its potential, and the prototype grew into a national public-health application developed with government, health, and technology partners.

I served as Lead UX/UI Designer for eighteen months. The work combined interaction design, business analysis, public information, accessibility, privacy, and coordination across a technical organization of more than forty-five people.

The application eventually reached millions of people. Yet the most important constraint was present from the beginning: it had to earn trust without collecting the behavioral data product teams usually rely on to improve an experience.

We had to design a national product for an emergency while deliberately giving ourselves less information about the people using it.

01/05A product in a crisis+

A product in a crisis

From volunteer prototype to national infrastructure

There was no leisurely discovery phase. Public-health guidance, platform capabilities, legal interpretation, and people's understanding of the virus were all changing while the product was being built.

Designing while the problem was still moving

I helped translate an emerging Bluetooth protocol into flows ordinary people could understand and trust. The app needed to explain what it did, what it did not do, and what a user should do after receiving an exposure notification without creating unnecessary fear or false certainty.

As the initiative moved into long-term cooperation with the Polish government, the work expanded beyond screen design. I collaborated with government stakeholders, GovTech, public-health partners, and the wider product team to keep the experience aligned with current guidance and feasible within a rapidly changing technical environment.

ProteGO Safe running on three handsets, showing onboarding, daily health check and exposure-risk states — **The product's evolution**The application across onboarding, the daily health check, and exposure risk : the three things every user had to understand immediately.

Privacy and evidence

Learning without traditional analytics

ProteGO Safe was designed around privacy by design and privacy by default. Anonymous identifiers stayed on the device, and the experience did not require a phone number or user account. That protection was essential to public trust, but it also removed many conventional product analytics.

Replacing dashboards with human evidence

We redefined validation around qualitative evidence. More than sixty testers, doctors, friends, ambassadors, and other collaborators helped us assess comprehension, emotional response, accessibility, and the clarity of critical instructions.

This required more deliberate questions than a conversion funnel would. Could people explain how exposure detection worked after reading the onboarding? Did they understand that the app did not track their location? Could they distinguish an exposure notification from a diagnosis? The answers shaped both the interaction model and the language around it.

Trust at national scale

Clarity was part of the safety model

A privacy-preserving architecture cannot build trust if the interface explains it poorly. The experience had to be accessible to a national audience with very different levels of digital and health literacy.

Designing public-health communication

I worked across UX, interface design, and documentation to make the system's behavior legible: Bluetooth proximity rather than location tracking, anonymous keys rather than personal identities, and clear next steps rather than alarming messages.

The product also had to remain consistent with official health information and European interoperability work. I contributed to business analysis, algorithm discussions, documentation for officials and users, and collaboration around the European Federation Gateway Service context.

Scale and responsibility

A public product is never only a product

By March 2021, the Polish government reported 1,876,099 downloads. At that scale, every ambiguous sentence, inaccessible state, and inconsistent instruction was multiplied across a national audience.

Leading design through continuous change

I coordinated design decisions across product, engineering, public administration, health experts, and communications. The work required fast iteration, but also the discipline to document why a decision existed and what could happen if it changed.

ProteGO Safe was ultimately retired in March 2022 as the pandemic response and legal context changed. That lifecycle is part of the case study: responsible public technology must be able to evolve, communicate its limits, and end when its original mechanism is no longer the right intervention.

ProteGO Safe presented with its Polish government and EU partner marks during national rollout — **National-scale delivery**The application alongside its government and EU partner marks. At national scale the institutional context is part of the product.

Reflection

The most important project of my career

ProteGO Safe remains a career-defining project for me. It compressed nearly every responsibility of product design, including research, systems thinking, accessibility, communication, delivery, and leadership, into a public emergency where the consequences felt immediate and real.

It also changed how I think about evidence. Product teams often treat more data as the natural path to better decisions. ProteGO Safe demonstrated that respecting people can require collecting less, and that good research practice can still create clarity when analytics are intentionally constrained.

The work was imperfect because the moment was imperfect. What I remain proud of is that we kept designing for trust: in the technology, in the instructions, and in the people using it.

Next project