Girl Develop It! Hackathon
WINNER – BEST UX | November 18, 2017
The Event
Girl Develop It! is a national organization with a significant chapter located in Boston, Massachusetts. The group puts on events, including coding workshops, tutorials, and mentorship opportunities, for women (and those who identify as women) who are interested in learning about programming and development. They hosted their first hackathon on Saturday, November 18, at Amazon’s Audible offices in Cambridge, MA.
The Premise
Each team consisted of 4-6 participants, all working at varying levels of proficiency and in different facets of web development and design. I was assigned to a team of three women, all relatively new to development; I was the only UX designer on the team. We kicked off by exploring ideas and areas of interest, and it quickly became apparent that we had one prominent factor in common: a passion for community engagement.
Ideation
Our team recognized that we wanted to focus on community engagement, but that concept can take many forms. To narrow it down, I suggested that we create a protopersona to gauge our assumptions and use our personal experiences to our advantage. Enter Billie, a newcomer to a big city who seeks to actively engage with the community. We created biographical details, behaviors, needs and goals, and pain points. Finally, we came up with solutions to address the pain points and meet the goals, and then dot voted to decide which we should work on.
The Process
The two most-voted solutions were an email newsletter that suggests events, targeted by selected interests, and a calendar plugin that looks at the user’s schedule and suggests when one might use free time for events of interest. We itemized key features, and, given the tight time constraints of the day, jumped straight into divvying up tasks and working on them separately. We timeboxed sessions to ensure that we were checking in with each other every twenty minutes or so. While my teammates worked on syncing a site with Google Calendar and creating a web crawler, I focused on creating sketched wireframes to outline our UI.
Getting Started
We decided to call our app Time Well Spent. The aim was to sync the app to the user’s Google Calendar so that it could identify potential free time in the schedule. Then, the user would walk through the application to select areas of interest. Then, the user would receive event suggestions based on their free time input and interests, and could add events directly to the calendar through the application.
We opted to design mobile first. As a first step, we needed to give the user a quick, easy way to set preferences. The first step was the sync with Google Calendar; the actual procedural needs were a little murky here, since we were all coding beginners, but given prior experience with syncing Google applications, we assumed this step could be nearly as simple as submitting your Gmail address. Then, we needed to tell the application when the user was free; the calendar may show no activities planned for 3AM on a Wednesday, but the user almost certainly wouldn’t want to be getting unsolicited event invitations at that time. To accommodate this need, we added in flexible days and times so that the user could estimate when he or she would like to be available for local events.
Choosing Interests
Once the user input active hours and available days, he or she would move onto the interests pages. This is where the user would be presented with a randomized set of interests. Upon selecting some, all, or none of those interests, a more curated list would appear. The user would, again, select some, all, or none of these items, and then press submit to continue to the next page. The next page would allow the user to search for specific interests not previously encountered, and would add these new items to a running list of interests. The list would be editable, so if the user accidentally clicked an incorrect item on the last page, he or she would be able to correct the error.
Then, the user submits the full list—and receives a curated set of local events.
The Result
We finished up the day by presenting our prototype in front of all the teams and the judges. We walked them through our process, from protopersona creation, to development tactics, to user journeys. In the end, we were awarded Best User Experience Design overall, a prize we were thoroughly excited to take home.
As next steps, I would want to conduct user tests using the prototype. I would recruit users based on my protopersona, and have them walk me through their experience with the prototype. I would use data gathered from these sessions to further refine the prototype and hopefully create something that can be incredibly useful to people who are seeking to be engaged with their communities.
