An at-home test. A credential the country trusted.
NAVICA turned Abbott’s BinaxNOW rapid antigen test into a verified health credential, accepted by schools, employers, and venues nationwide. I designed the reporting experience end to end, under one of the tightest timelines of my career.
- Role
- Senior UX Designer
- Company
- Abbott Laboratories
- Timeline
- Feb - Jul 2021
- Platform
- iOS & Android
Problem
A positive or negative result had to travel from a kitchen counter to a school gate, an office badge scanner, or an airport counter, instantly, and without doubt.
Solution
A guided reporting flow built for a first-time, high-stakes moment: clear instructions, dynamic status tracking, and a credential trusted the second it's shown.
Impact
$760M in sales within 24 hours. 10,000 daily active users inside two weeks. Live in all 50 states.
Context
Designing at pandemic speed.
In February 2021, Abbott brought me on to design the mobile reporting experience for NAVICA, the companion app for its BinaxNOW at-home rapid antigen test. The test itself took 15 minutes; turning that result into something an employer, a school, or a venue would actually accept had to take a lot less time to design than it normally would. Five months later, in July, it shipped to iOS and Android nationwide, with no room for a slow discovery phase or a soft launch.
But the deadline wasn’t the hardest part to design for. This was a moment when everyone was afraid: businesses were closing overnight, travel plans were stalling at checkpoints, and most people had never self-administered a diagnostic test in their life. Every decision had to hold up the first time a nervous parent, or a first-time test-taker, opened the app, because a confusing screen didn’t just cost time, it cost someone’s confidence in a result they badly needed to trust. Designing NAVICA meant designing for people who just wanted their normal life back, not for a clinical workflow in the abstract.
The Problem
How do you turn a nasal swab into something an employer will trust, without a single misread result costing someone their job?
The experience had to hold three demands at once: the speed of an aggressive delivery timeline, the accessibility standards of a healthcare product used across every demographic in all 50 states, and the level of trust required to make a digital result credible to an employer, a school, or a healthcare provider checking it at the door.
Research
Meet Alissia.
- Occupation
- Sales Manager
- Location
- Atlanta, Georgia
- Age
- 30
- Family
- Married, 1 child
Biography
Alissia is a 30-year-old sales manager who’s fully dedicated to the people around her, especially her husband Karl and their young son. Taking care of her family’s health is part of that, which is why NAVICA plays a role in her regular routine of prevention and virus exposure control.
Needs
- An easy, safe way to use the BinaxNOW detection mechanism.
- A way to know, during confinement periods, whether she's positive or negative, so she can protect her family and cut chains of contagion.
- Continued digitization of the process, which she sees as a step in the right direction.
Pain point
She believes there’s always room for improvement, specifically speed: the mechanisms for running and validating a test could still be faster. At the same time, she thinks the idea itself is excellent, since it gives families an accessible way to detect COVID-19 at home without exposing anyone else.
“It’s very important to use alternatives that let us take care of ourselves at home.”
Goals
Alissia believes in easy detection and in caring for her family’s health as a path back to normal life. She wants to prevent exposure, help others do the same, report results honestly, and get the negative credentials she needs for school, work, and everyday life.
Approach
Four phases, one uninterrupted sprint.
Research and Discovery
Through rapid usability testing using think-aloud and Wizard-of-Oz methods, I surfaced the moments where users got confused, anxious, or stuck while reporting a result. Those moments shaped everything that came after.
UX/UI Design, Scope and Refine
I designed a streamlined reporting experience around dynamic status tracking, clear communication, and accessibility-first principles, cutting the uncertainty and cognitive load of a genuinely stressful task.
Prototype and User Testing
Working from Material Design 3 and Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, I built interactive prototypes and validated them through iterative usability testing, refining navigation, hierarchy, and status visibility before a line of production code existed.
Iterate and Passive Research
I kept refining the experience against user feedback, analytics, and accessibility reviews, testing across devices and breakpoints so confidence and task completion improved with every release.
Inside the app
A flow that starts before the swab comes out.
On Home, a member chooses whether they’re at a test site or already holding a test in hand. From there, every screen removes one specific reason to hesitate, starting with the basics before a single swab is opened.
Before you start
- 1.Wash or sanitize your hands and make sure they're dry.
- 2.The kit includes one swab, one test card in a pouch, and one dropper bottle. You'll need a timer, which isn't included.
- 3.Remove the test card from its pouch and lay it flat on the table. It has to stay flat for the entire test.
- 4.Check that the blue control line is visible in the result window. If there's no blue line, don't use the card.
Handle the card by its edges only. Don’t touch any parts on the inside.
Home
Quick access to get a test, scan one you already have, or self-report a result, right from where members already are.
Get a Test
Choosing between a self-test for detection and a test for negative credentials.
Scan a test
The camera reads the test card's QR code to identify which test it is, then routes straight into that test's guided flow.
Test detail
What it detects, how long it takes, and a single, clear call to action.
Open the card
Open the card, keep it flat, and never touch the test strip, shown as a short animation so the instruction reads at a glance, with the same steps readable by screen readers for users with visual impairments.
Insert the swab
Illustrated depth and angle, so the swab goes in exactly as far as it should, animated step by step and paired with screen-reader-friendly instructions.
Interaction
Step-by-step visual guides.
Every physical step of the BinaxNOW test, from opening the swab to reading the result, was animated inside the app so a first-time user never has to interpret a paper insert under pressure.
Abbott Laboratories
“Luis was a valuable asset of the team while we contributed to Abbott’s NAVICA program. He used his talent and skills to bring ideas to life through design. Luis has a solid understanding of User Experience and UI Design. He is able to work well in a fast paced environment and is a quick learner. Luis is a team player and he always carries himself in a professional manor.”
Digital Product & Strategy Leader Sr.
Impact
New users, real volume, no room for error.
$760M
Generated in sales within the first 24 hours of launch, immediate proof of market demand.
10,000
Daily active users within two weeks of release, a volume the platform had to support from day one.
50
States where NAVICA scaled beyond test reporting into a full healthcare ecosystem.
$114M
In enterprise-wide adoption, extending the product to employers, providers, and administrators.
Closing note
NAVICA shipped inside a public health emergency, and it had to be right the first time millions of people opened it. That constraint didn’t lower the bar on the design. It raised it.