Finding solace in design
How one designer countered the crisis and found a sense of community by helping the people of Wuhan
Shuting Chang is a senior product designer on our App Infrastructure team, working to improve the experience of how developers create apps for Shopify. Every February, she normally goes to China to visit her family in the city of Dalian for Chinese New Year celebrations. This year travel restrictions made that impossible, but an open source community gave her a way to use her design skills to help the people of Wuhan.
Tell us about the Wuhan 2020 community and how you discovered it.
When the virus situation started in China, I was still hopeful that I could travel back to China for my normal February trip. But things were getting more serious and the flights got canceled. I felt destroyed during that time. I really wanted to go back to see my family and my grandma. Both my grandparents are almost 90 years old.
I spent a lot of time online, reading the news and feeling really terrible. And then I saw an article posted to a social network about this open source community called Wuhan 2020. A whole bunch of designers, developers, and product managers were jumping together to form an open source information-sharing platform to help people in Wuhan. So I thought that, instead of sitting at home browsing bad news and feeling sad, maybe I should do something, and at least contribute whatever I could rather than complain about it. I think that’s important in a situation like this.
So what happened once you got involved and started to explore the community?
I was exploring how I could actually contribute and I found their GitHub repository. They have documentation about how people can take part. The next thing I saw was a Slack channel navigation shared on GitHub. So I started to see where I could jump in.
In the Slack channel I joined they had a Slackbot set up with documentation I could read and a spreadsheet where I could sign up. There were interesting designers from around the world who were contributing. They worked for companies in North America or Australia. Further documentation outlined the product requirements, and there was another log for all of the line tasks and who the owners were. So I started to reach out to people.
I discovered a lot of old faces I’d met when I was at an interaction conference in Toronto four or five years ago. They reached out to me and asked “Oh, are you Shuting from Toronto?” So that’s how I started to connect with people who were already working for this community as a designer. I asked them more about the process and how I could contribute. I ended up tackling a project to redesign the hotel section of the information sharing platform.
What is that hotel section and why is it important?
The hotel section was created at a time when the government felt the situation was out of control in Wuhan. They had decided to close down the city of Wuhan, and two days later they decided to close down the whole Hubei province. Hubei province has 60 million people. When it was closed down no one could go back in and no one could come out. The city is famous for its cherry blossoms in spring, but tourism was basically suspended and all the hotels were empty.
The hotel section has two main parts. One is for people from outside of Wuhan who couldn’t go back home. Hotels could provide rooms for these people at a reduced rate. Because Wuhan 2020 is an information-sharing platform, we wanted to list out all the hotels that had these rooms available for people from outside of Hubei province.
The other part was for all the medical staff in Hubei. One group was medical staff from Hubei, who were not supposed to go home after work because there was a higher chance they would take the virus back to their families. The other larger group was the 30,000 medical staff from all over China that the government sent to Wuhan to help local people. Hotels were offering free rooms for medical staff as long as they could bring their own covers and pillows.
Of course, Wuhan 2020 was not the only platform to share information. The hotels spread the information on several platforms to ensure that people could learn about the resources available. But I designed a page to communicate this information for our platform. This was around the middle of February or a bit later. Then developers and the product manager started to refine the page. We worked on that a lot. By the time we finished it was the end of February. And by then, apparently the situation was under control. A lot of local medical staff went back home. So the design was partially implemented.
How long were you involved in the project? Have you continued to be involved or is the project winding down now?
It wasn’t long, maybe at the peak I spent like an hour per day, for about 10 days. When we were working on the project it was during Chinese New Year, when the government and many companies were shut down. So it was volunteers like us who had the time to work on this. Now the government and all the local tech companies have similar solutions implemented. Alibaba and WeChat all have similar functions. So the current discussion for the Wuhan 2020 community is “How we can help people outside of China? What are the opportunities there?” Any information or any PR that’s been shipped to date, we can reuse to localize it to help people outside of China.
Do you have any sense of what the impact of the project was?
At the beginning of February, or the middle of February, I heard it was one of the most visited GitHub repositories in the world. That’s actually when I saw it, and the traffic was still high after I joined. They recently held an international hackathon to see what ideas can quickly be turned into different small projects, rather than having a big platform to maintain.
Can you tell me a little bit about what you learned from the process?
I learned a lot about contributing to an open source community. I think the best thing I learned was the impact of proper documentation setup — how fast a stranger can participate in a new product and how short the onboarding process can be. With proper set up, documentation, and communication, you can feel ownership of a project and feel like you’re contributing. The way it was set up enabled flexibility for collaboration. So even though I didn’t have a lot of time, and no one did, as a whole we could still do things and help people.
I was also impressed by how they put up a design system first. So for us designers, we could jump in and have elements ready that were not only designed, but also implemented in the front end with React. We felt confident with the design system because whatever we designed, as long as we used the components, would be implemented in an effective way.
I think it helped that the documentation was relatively light. It also documented things like the user need, what we want to achieve, and specifically what we want to achieve with each iteration. That detailed documentation helped people break work down and try to remove dependencies. Fresh people jumping in could see where we were at for each iteration. So I think that part helps. And of course the design system, it evolved from Ant Design, a design system created by Ant Financial, an affiliate company of Alibaba. They leveraged a lot of what’s there to try to create the visual language. I feel like the whole experience made me want to learn more about the technologies going on in China, and the design trends, and the tools they use. It’s eye opening to see how much I didn’t know about things going on in China in the past few years.
I guess the other finding is that I also donated a bit of money at the very beginning when the situation happened. But it took 45 days for my money to purchase something that then traveled to China and got to the doctor who needed it. For this project, we collaborated internationally throughout the world and we were able to put something up in two weeks. And I feel like that potentially helped more people than my donation. So I was kind of amazed as a designer how I can contribute to a situation that’s so far away in such a short time.
