Our first ever hackathon!
Coming up with a feasible new product in a day… it’s easy when you try.
Hackathons are that great heady mixture of team-building, blueskies thinking (yes I used that word, I’m about to use ‘lean and agile’ below, so steel yourself) and frenetic hacking together products before the deadline.
Some great things have come out of hackathons, like the Facebook ‘like’ button and ‘timeline’.
And if done properly they can involve the skill sets of everyone in the company, and not just the tech and product teams. This makes them a great way to get everyone stuck in and thinking in lean and agile methodology terms.
Chip’s first ever hackathon task
Leveraging Chip’s customer’s bank transaction data, build a feature that customers would desire enough to pay for.
It must be commercially viable, technically feasible, and scalable for long term growth.
- MVP prototype within the Chip 2.0 ecosystem.
- Landing page hosted on Squarespace asking for signups.
- Fake press release to TechCrunch
- Calculations showing commercial scalability & feasibility.
Each group was assigned an expert to cover tech, design, marketing, data, and commercial to try and build and market the product
We started at 2pm and powered through till 10pm, fuelled by pizza and beer.
When the deadline bell tolled at the end of the day, we presented our ideas and demonstrated our prototypes back to everyone and voted on what was the best idea.
Group one (Team Fish & Chips)— ‘Winning Wednesdays’ quiz
Group one decided that a quiz was the best way to hit the hackathon brief.
The new feature gives Chip users the chance to win back the value of one of their transactions made in the past month up to the value of £100. But there would be entrance fee of 50p.
The quiz would pop up via a push notification every Wednesday (hence the name).
The rationale was to get people to think more about their budgeting in an engaging way.
Creating the questions
The first step was to draft up some questions using three parameters:
- What was spent
- Where it was spent
- When it was spent
There was as much science as art involved. The balance had to be struck between making the questions difficult enough that the quiz could generate revenue, but also easy enough to be fun and ensure there were plenty of winners.
Designing a UI
A UI was knocked together on Sketch in record time.
It had four stages, some light animation work and was but into a prototype for viewing.
Building the quiz
Chip’s newest iOS dev (strictly speaking he still hadn’t started) then set about attempting to build the quiz with a very limited knowledge of Chip’s codebase.
The hack was built on the technologies consistent with Chip 2.0 front-end, that’s a server-driven UI written in Swift backed by a reactive MVVM architecture.
Group two (Team Chip & Pin)— IFTTT integration
Group two looked at integrating with the ‘If This Then That’ (IFTTT) platform.
It would enable Chip users to create IFTTT Applets, which perform pre-defined actions based on specified triggers.
One use-case is encouraging users to save more money through personalised incentives. For example you could say, “Every time I walk to work, save my tube fare in Chip.”
Using location data, the method of travel to work would be recognised. Once this happens, and the data shows the user has walked, it would trigger the action. The £4.50 tube fare a user has not spent will be moved straight into their Chip savings.
Aside from incentivising a user to save more, the versatility of IFTTT means users can have fun with the triggers.
Depending on who a user supports, the trigger “every time my team scores, save £1 to celebrate” could help someone save lots of money, or not very much (depending on who they support).
Once the connection is set up, users can create their own Applets around their life. Once created, the Applet will be reviewed and confirmed by Chip and the magic behind the screen will activate the trigger.
And the winner was…
Despite the fact that Team Fish&Chips had a much more complete prototype and commercial model, the votes came in and team Chip&Pin’s IFTTT integration won the day.
The general consensus was whilst the Winning Wednesday quiz was fun and could theoretically generate more revenue, IFTTT integration just felt more like it aligned with our values.
We’ve even decided to take it forward and build it into a premium product (along with several other features) that we’ll be launching sometime in 2019.
