NZ COVID Tracer app for Android and iOS

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#2567339 18-Sep-2020 10:24

BarTender:

I have the same, if have the app open while walking I can scan it while going into a store without slowing down.

The most frequent mistake is people are too close, or the store has laminated the poster but it isn't perfectly flat so has a glare... so I say pull back a bit or try further away on an angle and it works.

You're 100% correct that most people are too close when they try to scan the codes. In the Munzee game that I play, where the player has to find and scan QR codes in the real world, I can scan a postage stamp sized QR code from over a meter away. It sometimes amazes me that the technology can do that.

I think you've actually got a better chance of scanning the codes while you're still some distance off and moving towards them rather than standing stationary in front of them. This is because you're moving around and so the QR code scanner is getting to see the code from lots of slightly different angles / distances as you move towards the code and this can counter-act glare and such. I've certainly found this to be true when playing Munzee, in which I've scanned thousands of QR codes of various qualities. If standing stationary in front of the QR code then you often have to move your phone towards / away from the code and also angle it up / down / left / right in order to get it just right if there's glare from a window or lamination.

I've seen people standing in front of the code with their phone held steady pointing towards the code and wondering why it's not scanning. Often you can see glare in the image, eg one or more of the registration squares (the three large squares in the corners) has glare on it and can't be seen properly. If they just moved their phone around a bit to adjust the angles then they'd find that it scans pretty quickly.

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#2567344 18-Sep-2020 10:30

MurrayM:

I've seen people standing in front of the code with their phone held steady pointing towards the code and wondering why it's not scanning. Often you can see glare in the image, eg one or more of the registration squares (the three large squares in the corners) has glare on it and can't be seen properly. If they just moved their phone around a bit to adjust the angles then they'd find that it scans pretty quickly.

It doesn't help that some supermarkets and shopping malls place the posters on the glass and a sliding door opens over it, making it almost impossible to get the QR code without light being reflected when the doors open because you are getting close.

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#2567681 18-Sep-2020 15:42

Glare doesn't explain some of the scan failures/successes I've had. I've had quick scans with really awful glare (which is indeed a marvel given how difficult it would be to decode!) yet other posters with no glare (and actually looks very sharp etc) at all takes ages to scan. Agree a lot of movement is helpful. Also I find scanning at an angle is problematic, needs to be more straight on--which is tricky if the height of the poster isn't ideal. Wonder if all this QR scanning happening is going to feed into better algorithms for QR scanners as there is clearly a lot of room for improvement.

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#2567841 18-Sep-2020 20:26

A while back I did the following writeup after a chat with friends over how to turn the MoH app into something usable. It's become slightly less terrible since then, but I still thought it might be apropos.

The uptake of the MoH application, particularly before the second lockdown, has been embarrassing, two-tenths of a percent. To put this into perspective, if 3,000 people have potentially been exposed to Covid19 somewhere then a total of six will have used the app, and 2,994 have no tracing information available and will need to be traced manually. This is virtually the same as not having the app at all.

One big reason for the appallingly low uptake that the app has numerous design flaws that greatly impede its usability. To try and address this, a group of IT people got together to redesign it based on sound UX (user experience)/interaction design principles. The following wasn't written as an attack on the MoH but was motivated by serious concerns that one of the frontline tools for keeping NZers safe during Covid19 is unfit for purpose, which affects the safety of all NZers.

For an application of this kind, the primary design requirement is ease of use. In order to be effective, it has to be widely used, and in order to be widely used it has to be as easy and painless to use as possible. Unlike Facebook, Whatsapp, and Twitter there are no factors motivating users to struggle with an awkward interface in order to share cat videos or message the family, so any impediment to ease of use is an impediment to any use. Since the application currently contains a number of serious design flaws that impede its use, it ends up not being very effective.

Let's look at a hypothetical goal-oriented design for a contact-tracing application and then contrast it to what the MoH application does. From a goal-oriented point of view the primary purpose of the application is to record where the phone owner was, and when. Using the "pretend it's magic" design strategy, an ideal application would require a single tap on the application's icon to record the user's current location. The MoH application could actually come very close to doing this if it was designed differently.

To understand why it's nothing like this, it's necessary to look at both the usability and the technical aspects of the app. From the usability aspect the application uses a strategy called task-directed design. The application was required to do A, B, C, D and E, and so it's implemented as a shopping-list of options A, B, C, D, and E. In practice 99.999% of users only ever want to do A, record the current location, so the application should immediately open with A, and for the 0.001% of times when the user doesn't want to do A allow an optional escape to B, C, D, and E.

The next problem is technical. The app replies on users scanning a QR code. QR codes come in various complexity levels, sometimes confusingly called "versions". The more complex the code, meaning the higher the level/version, the harder it is to scan. The simplest code, level one, can encode the location of every business and home in New Zealand (for geeks, I'm omitting discussion of error correction to keep it simple). However the MoH are using an extremely inefficient representation format that loads a huge amount of unnecessary data into each code, requiring the use of what looks like a level thirteen (!!) QR code instead of a level one. QR codes with this density are extremely hard to scan, and this is made even worse by the fact that the posters are laminated into glossy plastic and the instructions to place them in windows means that they're behind shiny glass. It's actually hard to think of a worse setup in terms of reliable scanning of codes. So if you're standing in front of a Covid19 poster endlessly repositioning your phone in the hope that it might finally scan, with a line of people waiting behind you to do the same thing, it's because of this. QR codes can actually be quite readily scanned, just not the ones the MoH is using.

A third problem is the misuse of passwords. Even though the application protects absolutely nothing of value (on the remote chance that your phone gets stolen, the thief will go for your online banking and Trademe accounts, not look up where you went for coffee last Thursday), the app requires registration with a complex password that it forgets once a month, making it impossible to use the app when this happens. Although I've tried to keep this writeup neutral, this particular design issue is so astoundingly boneheaded that I'd like to suggest that whoever decided to do this needs to be killed and then eaten to prevent them from passing on the genes. There is no reason why there needs to be a password, and even less of a reason for the app to forget it every 30 days and make it impossible to use until the user can remember where they wrote it down and re-enter it, which typically isn't when they're about to scan a QR code and discover that the application has locked itself up yet again.

Now that we know how not to do it, we can look at how to do it, following the goal-oriented design principles above. When the app is tapped, it immediately opens to the QR-code scan stage. The QR code is a simple level one code, laminated or printed on matte plastic, and displayed with nothing covering it, so for example on the outside of shop windows without glass covering it. There are no passwords or lockouts involved. If the user wants to do something other than scan a QR code, they can tap an overlay icon at the top of the screen to go to other functionality.

There. Simple, isn't it?

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#2568825 20-Sep-2020 20:34

Since the update to iOS 14, the Apple exposure logging status is now inactive. It was active prior. Has this happened to anyone else?

Oblivian

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#2568826 20-Sep-2020 20:36

GSManiac:

Since the update to iOS 14, the Apple exposure logging status is now inactive. It was active prior. Has this happened to anyone else?

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GSManiac

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#2568856 20-Sep-2020 21:42

That’ll teach me. Thanks !

JaseNZ

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#2568870 20-Sep-2020 22:52

Yeah gotta suck when they plaster it all over the news about the integration with apple and then bam software upgrade and it is no more.

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#2568989 21-Sep-2020 09:45

JaseNZ:

Yeah gotta suck when they plaster it all over the news about the integration with apple and then bam software upgrade and it is no more.

That's because one person posted about it on a social network, a journalist saw the post, reported incorrectly without knowing/understanding the background and other media published their own take - without actually going through talking to people in the know first.

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#2569001 21-Sep-2020 10:00

freitasm:

JaseNZ:

Yeah gotta suck when they plaster it all over the news about the integration with apple and then bam software upgrade and it is no more.

That's because one person posted about it on a social network, a journalist saw the post, reported incorrectly without knowing/understanding the background and other media published their own take - without actually going through talking to people in the know first.

Ahhh thats the media for ya.

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#2569009 21-Sep-2020 10:21

It also seems it is how the wrong 'Get tested now!' mess got started. Share now, ask questions later.

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#2575819 29-Sep-2020 13:36

If you have updates off.. (late to notice a minor release)

With this release, contact tracers can now ask you to confirm your name and contact details when sending out a contact alert, so they can get in touch with you about a specific exposure event. Your privacy remains protected - it is your choice whether you respond or not.