Global Hackathon VII
- Alisha Truemper
- Aug 9
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 10
This Global Hack 7 tasked teams with finding solutions for problems that immigrants face when they arrive in the United States -- particularly those that land in St. Louis, MO.
Stakeholders include:
- Casa de Salud,
- The International Institute,
- The St. Louis Mosaic Project
- Immigrant Service Providers Network (ISPN)
The Goal
The overall goal of hackathons is to discover innovative ways to use technology to solve humanitarian problems. This global hackathon centered around improving experiences for foreign-born individuals and communities (immigrants and refugees).
My Role
As a Human-Centered Designer (HCD), it is my job to be the voice the end-user, identify pain-points in the processes that impact the users' experiences, and help my team identify solutions to the reduce friction and pain throughout the users experiences.
The Process
Requirements Gathering
Because the Hackathon lasts for 3 days, our teams have less than 36 hours to complete what we might usually do in a month on a client-facing project. So, we have to work extremely lean.
We were given four primary struggles upon which to focus:
1. Employment
2. Navigating Resources and Systems
3. Capturing Lived Experiences
4. Finding Community
In place of the typical user interviews, I absorbed details about the end users during a panel discussion featuring subject matter experts, and stayed after to probe for deeper knowledge -- while conveying my findings to the team via Slack in real time. We discussed my findings as a team, and then employed a Crazy 8's Design Session to ideate.
Ideation: Design Sprint
Due to the extreme time restrictions, I facilitated a design sprint with the team in the style of a Crazy 8. All the team members were given a piece of paper folded 4 times to create 8 areas. They were allowed to design for any of the 4 focus areas from the challenge brief. A timer was set for 8 minutes, and all the team members -- regardless of profession, role or skillset -- were challenged to draw 8 ideas in 8 minutes.
After the eight minutes was up, I instructed everyone on the team to share and explain their designs to the group. We cut out each design, then affinitized the design ideas on the wall to align with the target focus areas from the challenge brief. Two major ideas generated excitement from the team.
At the end of the first round of the design sprint the team marked each of the affinitized ideas that we would include. I wrote a user story for the application, validated the language with the developers and agile lead, and we moved forward, mapping out key workflows.
note: a crazy 8 usually includes 3 rounds of ideation to reduce and align the team's ideas. While it was clear that the project could have greatly benefited from completing all 3 rounds of ideation, the team drove forward into the development phase after the initial design session.
Development & Design
Energized toward a shared vision, the team whiteboarded out workflows for the key processes and began building our application. Major tasks were assigned and added to a backlog (post-it notes on a board).
Our visual designer and I worked together with some assistance from our junior front-end developer to design the user interface (UI); so that it would be ready when the developers arrived at the point in the process where they would put the face and name to the meat and bones of the application.
What We Were Building
The subject matter experts had described a day in their life as primarily speaking to immigrants in person and then making phone calls to connect users with resources. Their primary pain points were being under funded and over extended. They said that they had a lot of similar instruction and tasks to perform for similar types of immigrants, but each case was unique. So we sought to reduce their workfload by providing a tool that could act as an extension of themselves, especially helping with the tasks that they performed repeatedly.
Regardless of literacy or access to infrastructure, most immigrants -- documented, undocumented, and refugees -- had smart phones with limited data plans and were using WhatsApp to communicate with friends and family. Whatsapp seemed to be a primarily tool in translating their world as well.
Our tool would allow service providers to assign tasks to the immigrants, and get feedback when the immigrant encountered obstacles. Additionally, crowd sourced information would fill in the gaps that a basic Google search couldn't provide.
To get over language and literacy barriers the app would allow the user to speak their questions into their language, then receive the answer in their language even if the response didn't originate in it. For example: the a Vietnamese refugee could text their immigration attorney in Vietnamese, the app would translate their question into English for the attorney. The attorney could respond directly to the question in English, but the answer would display in Vietnamese to the immigrant. If they were not literate, a response could be crafted in video form, which would help host families, sponsors and helpful persons in the local Vietnamese community engage with the refugee in their dialect.
The Task Assignment page helps users get over the "Where do I start?" hurdle and reduce repetitive instruction.
Test & Pivot
I returned to the SMEs (subject matter experts) with additional questions to test our idea, validate our assumptions, and examples of how users would actually interaction with our build. Often volleying information in real time between the SMEs and the developers via Slack. Our agile lead followed up as well, which helped validate my findings.
When back in the room with the agile lead and developers, our team had a quick check-in, and discovered a need to pivot. While the SMEs liked our idea they didn't want to send sets of tasks to their immigrants.
Although frustrated by the sudden uncertainty as to what we were planning to build and certain members' roles suddenly becoming called into question with the new direction, we had the difficult discussions over what was important for our intended users. We updated the backlog and the team rallied to push through the final stage of the development process.
Telling A Story
The agile lead and head developer crafted language speaking to the technical aspects of our build and I injected communication around the human-experience of interacting with the tool. My focus was on helping the team explain how our artificial intelligence would directly improve the lives of the user and relieve the pain points service providers felt by extending themselves.
"We heard you say that you can't go to every appointment with every immigrant, but Maya can."
Maya, our application, could help the service provider connect users to resources without making one more phone call, and provide answers to questions when the service provider or sponsor wasn't available by crowdsourcing the information from the community that was such a major influence on the immigrants' success at finding independence. Video would reduce the language barrier in cases of low literacy. Maya would build a dashboard of information that the service provider could use to record outcomes to tell the stories that would get them much needed grants, funding, social awareness and policy changes.
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