Quarantine, but not for creativity

In April 2020 everyone was facing restrictions, quarantine and a good dose of anxiety because of the virus.

Back then I was living in Brussels, stuck in a small 30m2 flat with my partner. Both remote working from this tiny space.

We were overwhelmed by updates, numbers of infections and numbers of deaths. We all know it wasn’t nice and things were a bit strange.

Bringing the right positivity

In that days I read a lot and I realised that inside all the media chaos there were also some positive news.

As humans we always have a great capacity of adaptation and some interesting things became new social norms. Some of the main positive outcomes from this situation were:

• Remote working spreading
• People donating money to hospitals
• A rise in solidarity initiatives, both online or in the real world
• Reduction of CO2 emissions
• New ways of connecting with other persons through Zoom, Teams, Google Meet
• Sometimes a rediscovery of ourselves and of our fragility
• Joint efforts worldwide for open-source research and medicines development

One night while being silly with my girlfriend and imagining we could shoot the virus like in a videogame I got the idea.

What if I create a game in which you literally can shoot virus cells? And after every level some positive news get prompted on the screen?

I immediately got enthusiastic and started to work on it.

Assembling the dream team

In the past I worked on few small projects with two good friends of mine, Simone Antonicchio e Brian Baldovino. They also happen to be two of the best programmers I’ve ever met.

After I told them about VIRUS+ they accepted immediately to be part of it. They pointed out the right technologies to use and gave valuable feedbacks on how to build VIRUS+.

For the code we got a lot of inspiration from Reacteroids, an open-source project known by Simone. We adapted it to our goals and I started to imagine a new UI.

To track our progress I also set up a Trello board using a classic Kanban structure (to do, doing, done). The ball was rolling and everyone started to work on their tasks with great passion and enthusiasm.

At this point I also started to think on ways to make the future web app “viral” so in parallel I started to draft a content strategy and an editorial plan.

I researched young influencers, indie magazines and different social media accounts that could give visibility to VIRUS+.

Stream of conscious design

Given the tech choices and with the aim of going online asap, I adapted Reacteroids layout to our desired UX/UI.

I created a style guide and I applied it consistently to all the screens. We wanted to have a vintage look (like every good arcade game) so I used an ad-hoc combination of colors, font and icons.

After few design iterations and reviews we agreed on the final UX/UI and my friends deep dived into the development.

Two points that I’d like to highlight are the following:

Virus cells

We built the cell using HTML Canvas es6 to keep good performance since at every level the cells increase.

This was interesting to explore. I shaped the initial code draft of the cell and later my friend Simone refined it.

Desktop and Mobile modes

We planned to share VIRUS+ through Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. Thus we wanted the users to have the best experience from whatever device they would open it.

I optimised the UX/UI for different viewports and based on the device used the desktop engine or the mobile engine is triggered. That’s my friends magic touch, so cool!

The social spreading of VIRUS+

The demo was almost ready so we focused on the launch.

We contacted different influencers and magazines that were interested in promoting our story.

Four contacts got on board but we got super excited after the positive answer of Lucia Caretti.

Lucia is a young journalist and Social Brand Manager for La Stampa (one of the main Italian newspapers) and she embraced our project immediately.

Since she is also the digital strategist for a charity NGO she suggested we could allow users to make a donation from our website.

The money raised would be used by hospitals to buy extra ICUs and medical equipment to face the pandemic. We already had something similar in mind so we loved the idea.

I reviewed with her some positive news we wanted to spread around and she interviewed me. The interview got published on La Stampa website and its main goal was to inform about our initiative.

Days of excitement followed and on this wave I designed Facebook and Instagram posts.

I used the same style guide defined before and as a Tone Of Voice we went for something light, entertaining, insightful and of course positive.

I programmed the posts and set a message template for Whatsapp to be shared around.

Me, Simone and Brian were ready.

We had a videocall and we published VIRUS+ online on April the 15th 2020, after only 1 month of exciting work.

The monitoring

After the launch we enjoyed the moment and monitored analytics. Many persons from our social circles gave us really positive feedbacks. In some cases we received also some suggestions for improvements.

We thought we planned well the whole launch and spreading phase but our analytics were not reaching great numbers. Even worse, we didn’t see a sort of exponential effect.

We did see some peaks of traffic when La Stampa published our initiative and the other partners talked about us but we weren’t satisfied.

Thus we set up some campaigns to reach more young people and show ads of our project to relevant segments.