72 Hour Hackathon - Help Out Website
Our team came up with the idea of a service-oriented website where people could volunteer their time and services, and others could request help or services. This would all happen in a localized area, to foster the idea of community and helping out your neighbors nearby.
Project Objective
Provide neighbors within the Santa Monica community a platform to connect and help each other out during COVID19.
My Role
The time frame for this Hackathon was 72 hours. In such a short window, every team member assisted with every part of the project. With that being the case, we did try and divide the responsibilities so that different people would direct the work on specific phases of the project from start to finish.
Assisted with all parts of the project including:
Took Point On
Collaborating over the High Fidelity design
Persona Creation
Assisted with all parts of the project including Research, Interviews, Information Synthesis, Ideation, Sketching, Wireframing, Low-Fidelity Design, Mid-Fidelity Design, High Fidelity Design, Artifact and Deck Design
Research
With the short time frame for the Hackathon, we quickly realized we didn’t have time to do full-scale research, but instead we had to make quick assumptions and test and iterate fast to validate those assumptions.
We did know we wanted to work on a solution for two groups:
Volunteers - Those that would be providing their time and services.
Assistance - Those that would be asking for assistance from the volunteers.
We looked for similar sites in companies that would be competitors to our idea, like Next Door, My Coop, Olio, Front Porch Forum and Neighborland. While some of these sites had an idea similar to ours, they were often outdated, lacking features like search and filters or the ability to communicate with other users on the site. We worked to design those features into our idea to provide a clear competitive advantage over our proposed competition.
To find out why, we contacted them, interviewed them in person, talking with volunteers and staff.
Since this Hackathon took place during the COVID 19 Pandemic, all of our research was done through video interviews. We originally thought this would be a huge obstacle, but we were able to find people at home and conduct interviews over video chat, and this was important for us to get access to people we otherwise would not have been able to meet in person.
We learned the following from our research:
People definitely needed assistance of various kinds like getting groceries, getting cleaning items, transportation, and food delivery.
People were often forced to try and adapt and learn new technologies, like food delivery apps, or video chat services to communicate with family and friends.
People wanted to donate their time and services to their neighbors but didn’t have a directed, easy way to do that without seeming overbearing or intrusive.
Some people were just plain lonely and wanted somebody to talk to for some much needed human contact.
Feature Prioritization
We evaluated the feedback from our users on features that they would like to see on a site for volunteering and asking for help. A few things kept coming up in the interviews, they wanted the ability to find topics easily, they wanted to be sure it was in their immediate location, and they wanted a safe and secure messaging system to contact people and communicate details of what they might need assistance with.
We developed two personas
Our research was clear from the beginning that we needed two personas since there are two sides to this interaction, the volunteer and the person asking for assistance.
Problem Statement and User Flow
We evaluated our information and designed a problem statement and user flow.
Design, Testing and Iterations
We started our design process with a low fidelity prototype. We found that our testers gave us feedback on a few items to improve:
Explanation on Home Page
Easy/Secure Sign in
Distinguish between Volunteer & Seeking Assistance
Revise copy so it’s easy to understand
With that in mind, we moved on to Mid-Fidelity designs.
After testing with the mid-fidelity designs, we learned a few more things.
Our visual style needed to be consistent
Show not tell, especially with the icons we would use
Make the user flow make sense for that specific user
With the feedback that we received, we moved on to High Fidelity for the finished product, final polishing and presentation to the professionals evaluating our work.
Outcomes
While this was a Hackathon that was a 72-hour sprint, we learned a lot of things. The first was the importance of keeping things moving. We had lots of moments of hesitation, of group discussion and times where we just needed to take a break. We took time for all of these things, but we really had to recognize that we had to make decisions with the information that we discovered and push forward quickly. Putting out a minimum viable product was the ultimate goal. We recognized that things could be reworked at a later time, but getting a good foundation for the product quickly was the prime objective early.
We learned the importance of working with the Software Engineering Immersive graduates. It sometimes seemed like we didn’t speak the same language, so the value of good communication and having clear goals were essential. As we came to understand the direction we were going in, our efforts really aligned and our productivity increased.
The end result was something that we felt really happy with and that hit the mark for the problem that was presented to us. We won the hackathon, and that was an achievement that we were proud of for the work that we had done over those three days.
Next Steps
We only had time to build out one flow, so we would like to go through the other flow and fill that out with research and designs. We really needed to have clear goals for each of the communication features that we talked about implementing and there is plenty more to dig into there that could be fleshed out and completed.