Getting my design mojo back: surviving Kiwi.com’s 24-hour hackathon
Rose is a UX/UI Designer & Educator based in Barcelona. She recently completed the design bootcamp at Ironhack. This post is about her experience as a participant at the kiwi.com 24-hour hackathon on Friday, September 27th, 2019. Kiwi is a Czech travel company, helping people find the best and cheapest travel options.
Hacking is hard work.
But I was up for the challenge.
I was feeling a little down recently and I couldn’t pinpoint why. I completed my studies in design at Ironhack about a month ago and post-bootcamp life has been quite productive: full of portfolio-building, networking, and job applications. But then it hit me:
I missed designing.
Catching up on sleep and getting caught in the job search, which we all know is a full-time job in itself, meant I wasn’t working on new design projects.
You can take the designer out of the bootcamp, but you can’t take the design out of the designer. Does that make sense?
When I learned about Kiwi.com’s Travel Hackathon, I jumped at the chance to participate. I wanted to design. I needed to design:
So, what better way to throw myself back into the fire than a 24-hour hackathon?
I’ve only ever been involved in one other hackathon event. It was organized by Ironhack and Austrian retail giant, XXXLutz. In a team of other designers and developers, we had to redesign their website in 8 hours. Kiwi was giving me triple the time, so how hard could it be?
We arrived at Aticco, a coworking space in the lovely neighborhood of Gràcia, at 6pm. Cold beer awaited us as we mixed and mingled with other participants before kicking off the event. My partner and I are both designers, so we enlisted a few developers, and Team Awesome was born!
The Project
Kiwi was open to any interpretation of the project, the only fundamental guideline was to build something that followed one of the key themes:
Community — Accessibility — Sustainability
We chose sustainability and my group had me present our team’s pitch where I accidentally dropped the F-bomb:
We all know our planet is F*****, so let’s empower people to make better and smarter travel choices!
The countdown started and with post-its and sharpies in hand, we began to plan our project. My partner and I had conducted some research the day before, having interviewed four people about their travel habits and motives, so we had a good understanding of the problem we wanted to tackle:
People need a way to be more aware of their environmental impact in order to make better sustainable travel choices.
We brainstormed possible solutions before going with the idea of one of the developers:
Make trees a type of currency.
There are a lot of sites out there that inform people of their carbon emissions contribution when taking flights. We realized through paper prototyping at 1 am, how much guilt this imposed on people: users felt overwhelmed and hopeless when they saw this big scary number next to the price of their flight.
People know travel costs more than money, but seeing carbon emissions expressed in a number was not relatable.
The truth is, travel is unavoidable these days. Be it if you travel for work, live far away from home (just as I do), or have a burning desire to see as much of the world as possible.
So how can we travel, be aware of our impact, and try to make up for it?
We found an article in The Guardian which inspired us. It states that there is scientific evidence that shows:
planting trees is by far the most convenient and cheapest way to combat climate change.
So the idea was to get people to pay a tad more in addition to their flight (by their own choice, of course), to plant trees as a way to make up for their impact and help reforest the world.
So, the developers codded away, creating an equation that would calculate carbon emissions and the number of trees needed to be planted to offset the emissions. My design partner and I, worked on adding to the UI of the existing Kiwi site to reflect our new feature.
Fun fact: a tree can offset 22kg of carbon in one year.
At 4:30am, 8 hours into the project and several cups of coffee later, Team Awesome felt far less than awesome. We decided to break, as sleep was needed to refuel. So we went home for 4 hours. The funny thing is, I couldn’t actually fall asleep. I ended up resting in my bed, but my brain was still thinking of trees.
We returned to work at 8:30 am. Kiwi generously provided us with everything we needed to get through the day: meals, snacks, unlimited caffeine, and endless positive reinforcement from their lovely team of mentors (thanks, guys!). Finally, at 4 pm in the afternoon, we submitted our project.
What we did
A. We redesigned the homepage search to include two types of searches:
- one for those who know the destination they want
- one for those who know the type of experience they want but not a destination (by searching tags, which is a feature that already exists, customers are given destination suggestions)
Why did we do this? Choice is at the heart of our redesign and though not directly related to sustainability, we want to give customers choices from the very start of the trip planning process.
B. Information about the tree planting initiative on the homepage: a good marketing strategy to show customers that Kiwi cares about sustainability.
C. The number of trees needed to offset carbon emissions is placed next to the price of a journey. Users can now see the potential positive contribution they can make (rather than the negative impact of their travel).
D. A choice on how much customers want to donate: again, it’s all about giving the customer the freedom to choose. For every Euro donated, a tree is planted. So customers can decide how much of their impact they want to offset (hopefully, they will want to offset the whole journey).
Here’s the prototype:
Learnings
- I really really love sleep
- I don’t know how effective caffeine is after coffee number 5
- At 4am when I thought the idea wasn’t working, I put trust in the design process and voila, it worked out (it always does)!
- Communication is key, especially when your team is sleep-deprived and your brains are not functioning at their best
- I’m a traveler and I’ve got to seriously start doing my part to lessen my environmental footprint
and most importantly….
- I never want to go a month without designing, again!
