VaxStat.ca—a vaccination statistics tracker that showed Canadians how the vaccine rollout was progressing. Province-by-province breakdowns, trends, projections, and the “when will we hit X% vaccinated?” estimates everyone wanted.
Remember early 2021? Everyone was refreshing government websites trying to figure out when they’d be eligible for a shot. “Daily vaccinations” was a number that mattered. The official government dashboards were not great. Updated inconsistently, hard to navigate, missing the comparisons and projections people actually wanted.
So I built something better. Real-time vaccination numbers (well, as real-time as government data gets), province comparisons, trend analysis, pace calculations.
People used it. A lot. When you’re building something because the official tools are lacking, and then actual citizens rely on it, that’s different validation than any A/B test.
The government eventually improved their own dashboards, which is exactly what should happen. But for a few months, VaxStat was how a lot of Canadians tracked progress. Sometimes the best product work is just filling gaps that shouldn’t exist.