From a physical vaccination card to a digital experience for more than 10 million people

During the pandemic, the Vaccination Record became an everyday service for millions of people in Peru. It allowed citizens to check their registered doses and show proof of vaccination when required.

The product had grown quickly in response to an exceptional situation. As it expanded, issues also emerged around navigation, information hierarchy and consistency across screens.

There was another, less visible challenge: designing a public digital experience for citizens with very different access to technology. Someone using a recent smartphone needed to access the same service as someone using a low-end device with a much smaller screen.

My job was to revisit that experience and build a clearer, more accessible foundation that could continue to grow.

For most people, opening the Vaccination Record served a very specific purpose: finding their information and being able to show it quickly. The interface, however, had accumulated content and navigation that made those tasks less straightforward than they needed to be.

Before designing the new screens, I researched which smartphones, operating systems and screen sizes were most commonly used in Peru at the time.

That research changed an important design decision: instead of starting from the ideal device, I chose to design from more constrained scenarios. If this service was going to become part of the country’s digital public infrastructure, it also needed to work for citizens using low-end smartphones.

At the same time, I reviewed the information architecture, key journeys and areas where the experience could be simplified. This allowed me to separate navigation, content, hierarchy and responsive issues before moving into UI design.

I started with structure and user journeys. Before deciding what the interface should look like, I needed to understand what information belonged on each screen, how it should be prioritized and how people would move between the main tasks.

Interface decisions were evaluated against the most constrained conditions I had identified: smaller screens, older devices and an experience that still needed to be understandable without relying on high-end hardware.

From there, I translated those decisions into flows and interface proposals that I could review with the team before moving into visual detail.

The redesign could not be solved one screen at a time. I needed a shared foundation that would keep the experience consistent as the product continued to grow.

I worked on defining reusable components, variants and usage rules that could be applied across the experience and make collaboration between design and development easier.

The system also needed to preserve that consistency across different screen sizes instead of depending on a single type of device.

Mobile first was a consequence of the context, not a design preference.

Before designing the interfaces, I researched the smartphones, operating systems and screen sizes that were most common in Peru. The conclusion was clear: designing only around recent smartphones could exclude some of the citizens who needed to use the service.

That is why I chose to start with smaller screens and low-end devices. Essential information still needed to be readable, primary actions needed to remain clear and key journeys had to work without assuming recent hardware.

For me, this was also an accessibility decision: adopting a new government technology should not depend on the phone someone could afford.

The redesign created a clearer and more consistent experience for a platform used by more than 10 million people.

The new architecture, Design System and accessibility decisions created a foundation designed to work across a much wider range of devices and screen sizes.

Beyond modernizing the interface, the goal was to make sure the digitalization of the service could also reach citizens with less access to recent technology.