Re:source Hackathon

One morning, I checked my email and saw a call requesting engineers, designers, and product managers to come mentor a hackathon for teams produce tools to help newcomers build new lives in the United States.

Curious about the prompt, I jumped on the opportunity to join a team. With the political tension in the air, I wanted to support a good cause and also meet with a new team of smart individuals to brainstorm solutions for an underserved community.

We had 12 hours on a Saturday to come up with a digital tool to help refugees.

The hackathon prompt

Our morning kicked off with brief talks from refugees describing their journey in order to learn more about the struggles they face. Each team was provided a few pages of context in order to kick off brainstorming and it was left to each team to use the design tools they knew in order to move forward.

Mentors from the refugee community moved from team to team to answer any questions.

Our team was assigned the open-ended prompt, leaving it very greenfield for us.

Kicking things off

The team first started with 4 designers and 4 engineers. We introduced ourselves to one another, stated our goals and started sharing ideas, working through a round table as each person politely gave their input. 

Creating structure for brainstorming

For the first 45 minutes discussed each idea one at a time and put it aside to review the next idea that was proposed. With this pace, I harbored concerns that our team would chat aimlessly without progress towards choosing a problem and coming up with a concept.

There were super smart people in our team who were passionate about the cause, but we still hadn't figured out our north star. We needed more information in order to understand what refugees face, so we turned to a refugee mentor for assistance and briefly interviewed him in order to identify the journey that a refugee takes prior to arriving in the United States.

Once we had a basic mental map of what a refugee experienced, I sketched simple personas referenced in our brainstorm in order to understand the different actors in the situations we thought of addressing.

With the personas and the journey in mind, we discussed the refugee's needs after their 3-6 month financial runway and continued brainstorming how we could connect refugees to the resources they need.

Expanding on the settled refugee persona, we opted to broaden it to include any good samaritan locals who also wanted to welcome new refugees into the community.

Exploring marketplace products

We agreed that as a team, we want to connect refugees to locals who could help them. How might we do that? To break down a broad goal into concrete components, I used a design tool called User / Situation / Motivation / Outcome in order to map out a couple of outcomes that a refugee may desire.

The team struggled to connect how the situations and motivations listed would connect to the outcome. One team member in particular was keen on offering potluck dinners to refugees to welcome them to the community and I had some skepticism with regards to how that would help refugees facing dire situations. However, I wanted to keep an open mind and we ended up sussing out this product concept in great detail.

I asked the team to brainstorm the riskiest assumptions should we go down this path of potluck dinners between refugees and the local community:

Riskiest assumptions

• People want to go to a stranger's home and trust their cooking
• Do people want to do a 10-person potluck?
• Do people want to do this?
• What about eaters with dietary restrictions?
• Do people want to facilitate this through a digital app? Could it be SMS? Something else? (ex: Hustle app)
• People will want to fill out a profile of their skills
• Assume refugees can access the internet
• Assume people can use an app
• Assume it'll be a positive experience
• Assume people will want to contribute or that people can find out about it
• Potlucks will bring value to people
• People will attend a themed dinner
• Do people have time to make it?
• Can they get to a dinner? (Transportation-wise)

There were also open questions that we uncovered and put aside as we uncovered the riskiest assumptions.

After going through these exercises, my skepticism regarding the potluck idea increased but I really wanted to give it a shot. I drew a storyboard to mock up how the potluck experience may go.

I discussed the steps in what I perceived the ideal user journey to be based on the storyboard I drew and from there, the large team split into two teams to focus on the idea each person gravitated towards.

Pivot

After the teams split, we had 2 engineers and 2 designers (including myself) on the team who chose to focus on connecting volunteers with refugees. By this point, we approached the lunch hour and with my designer colleague we finally acknowledged that with a hackathon this open-ended, we would need to rely on more on design tools to facilitate the brainstorming process.

For the second half of the day, we opted to systematically go through the current proposal in the format of a design challenge. It required some review of the insights we gathered earlier in the day but one of the engineers who joined our team was not present for the first half of the day so it would help to bring him up to speed and ensure that everyone is on the same page.

Approach:

• Paper Prototyping
• Wireframes

What I Learned:

(To be discussed!)