On your marks, get set, Hack!
Recently we were lucky enough to be invited to take part in RunHack London 2017. Runhack’s aim is to make cities more run-friendly by inspiring, prototyping and developing new ideas, services, products and policies.
With a lot of parallels between the benefits of running and our own big passion of walking it made perfect sense for us to take part. Recently launching our own app — Go Jauntly meant we already had a good idea of some of the issues experienced by Londoners.
In this post we talk about our prototype and what we learnt.
Why running?
At the start of the two day hackathon we heard from a number of inspirational speakers. There were a number of talks that really resonated with us and got our creative juices flowing:
Julie Creffield
Founder of ‘Too Fat To Run’, a running club aimed at people who may lack confidence in their body to go outside and run. Julie spoke about her personal struggles with her weight and the societal issues that surrounded her first steps towards a more active lifestyle.
Track Landscapes
Spoke about how we use public space and how their new forms of research provide insight into the active usage of urban landscapes. Including things like active bottlenecks and popular areas.
Good Gym
Ivo Gormley (@ivoivo) from Good Gym spoke about how they combine running and exercise with good deeds in local communities. We love hearing about enterprises achieving social good, and you’d be hard pressed to find a better example of that than Good Gym. It was also great to hear about Ivo’s occasional frustrations with running. This gave us a host of ideas for problems to solve.
It was also mentioned by Scott Cain (the King of Runhack) that scientists had recently discovered that running also improves memory and learning. During Friday we also met the awesome rufflemuffin from Snook who told us about her CycleHack project.
Assembling a ninja-like team
Having brainstormed a few ideas on Friday, we arrived on Saturday morning excited about the day ahead. As we presented the idea for our hack at the morning meeting it became clear that a few other lovely hackers wanted to help make it a reality. So with engineered precision and no messing around……we posed for this photo:
The idea
Two barriers of running that stayed with us from the talks were:
- While running in cities, runners often come across large groups of people, mainly tourists or commuters on their way to work. The time it takes for a runner to stop is often greater than you might expect. Runners have to politely ask the crowds to move aside or just simply make them aware of their presence.
- Fear and humiliation are emotions people often have when they embark on a run for the first time, with some runners reporting occasions when they have been verbally abused. We felt this needed to be tackled.
We wanted to create a mechanism that would allow runners to communicate with members of the public, quickly and effectively while running. We also wanted other runners to be aware of the locations of potential ‘black spots’ or areas best avoided when planning a run.
And so, ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ was born.
Prototyping our physical form
We were also really excited that our prototype required a physical element which we created using the Makers lab facility at Future Cities Catapult.
It’s usually really hard to do any kind of hardware at a hackthon due the incredible time constraints. Our approach was to use off the shelf hardware (an iPhone and a bluetooth speaker) as stand-ins for more bespoke hardware. Using laser cut card, velcro, and tape we modelled the prototype product. This let us move really quickly but also test the tactile parts of our solution as well as taking our idea to the street to test with the general public.
Digital prototyping
We were really lucky to have Max Stephan (github here) Senior Innovation Developer at Geovation on our team. Max suggested using Firebase to handle the data side of our solution. We’d wanted to work with Firebase for quite some time and Run Hack was the perfect opportunity to give it a test drive. As expected Firebase excelled at getting us up and running quickly and the real time data sync was an added bonus. We’ll definitely be using Firebase in future hackathons.
We managed to get a lot done in the very short space of time. Our application logged time and location every time a user pressed one of the two buttons on our prototype. Each time a button was pressed it would play a loud sound from the Bluetooth speaker, alerting passers by of the approaching runner. We tested polite sounds on one button, like bicycle bells through to more authoritative sounds such as boat horns and car beeps on the other.
A live map then displayed each press type in real-time.
We imagine that if this were a real product that the map view could be used to warn other runners of congested areas or areas where an incident had occurred with a member of the public.
We presented the idea to the RunHack participants with a live demo. Poor @annamikaela had to run around the building pressing the two buttons, but hey presto – up popped her markers in real-time on the giant map 👆.
We had a great two days and it was great to meet some really interesting people and see everyone’s ideas to hack running in London.
You can download the public beta Go Jauntly on the App Store here. We’re currently piloting in London, UK.
This insight was brought to you by the team at Furthermore, a multi-platform digital product and service design studio based in London. We have one mission: to create innovative digital products that stand out in the landscape, are beautiful, purposeful and a delight for the user. Hot on user experience and user research, we believe good ideas can come at any point in a project, so we utilise agile methodologies. Hypotheses are always tested using prototypes and real users, with improvements being constantly fed back into our user experience and visual designs. Get in touch and let’s make something great together.
