The Mo App
This is the story of the MO app and how it was created over one weekend in April 2020, while the COVID-19 outbreak is out there, during a virtual hackathon called SexHack. For this challenge, I teamed up with 3 talented women: June Calderón Ortega, Marina Merlin, and Simone Ferreira which are all also UX/UI designers, to create MO. We all met each other thanks to Ironhack, where we did our first steps into the UX/UI world.
About the hackathon
The SexHack is the first hackathon I ever took part in. It was all held virtually because of the circumstances, and 24 teams from around the world participated in it. The main topic of the hackathon was Sex, of course, and out of 4 challenges presented to us, we decided to front up with 2 of them:
Education — It all starts with education. How to better educate on this delicate subject? How to make this process interesting and engaging?
Health — Health is the most precious thing we have. How to protect it? How to raise public awareness of the importance of reproductive health?
2 Days sprint
As UX/UI designers we wanted to follow the design thinking process as much as we can during the hackathon, even though we only had 2 days. The tools we used:
Day 1: Empathize and define :
• Survey
• Guerilla interviews
• Online research
• Business & competitor analysis
• HMW (how might we) statements
Due to a lack of time, only a few people answered our survey and we had a chance to interview just 2 people.
Of course, this is not sufficient, but together with the online research we did it helped us to validate our concept and we learned that:
So we asked ourselves:
HMW make learning about period fun, light, and easy so kids can feel empowered to engage a conversation about it.
and,
HMW help young generations understanding the physical and emotional changes their bodies go through while menstruating so they perceive it as a natural process and not as a tabu.
For the competitor analysis, we compared 9 competitors and evaluated their apps/web apps:
After this, we determined our competitors’ positions in the market. We found a gap in the market to aim for. In this spot, we decided that our product would be more content based compared to the others which are built around a period tracker, and at the same time, we would have more childish than mature tone (not too much, though, so it can appeal to teenagers).
Day 2: Ideate, prototype, and concept test
Another thing we did to validate our idea was to create a landing page. We got 50 people interested in our platform in 12 hours, which helped us to assure there is a need for a product like ours.
With no time to spare, we also did the following:
• Moodboard & branding
• Feature prioritization
• Crazy 8
• Mid-fidelity wireframes
• High-fidelity prototyping
• business plan
We created two moodboards and in order to understand which one associates more with our brand attributes (friendly, young, and fun), we sent them on a survey. 70 people responded and made it clear which one is the chosen one.
For the MVP feature prioritization, we did the MOSCOW method and for generating ideas on how to visualize the features we did a round of Crazy 8. We all had similar ideas and it was fairly easy for us to decide which ideas were the best, by doing dot voting.
The two main features of MO will be:
1. Curated content all about menstruation, using positive words and correct terminology, which will give the kids confidence in having menstrual talks with family and friends with no shame about it.
2. Game mode. With the help of gamification, the kids will have fun while testing their knowledge about menstruation; they will also have the chance to dare their parents’ knowledge because hey, this should be part of a normal discussion between kids and their parents anyway.
From our low fidelity sketches we created mid-fidelity wireframes and then high-fidelity wireframes and prototype.
For our business plan after some research online, we decided to use the Freemium Business Model. MO will be free to download and users will be able to use the main features on the free version, which will ensure they will get quality knowledge of the topic. Though, if they want more value-add services such as access to the community (users and experts) and online workshops, they will have to get the paid version.
The pitch
After two days of hard work, 3 checkpoints, and not many sleep hours we compiled everything into a presentation and recorded a 3 minutes pitch. We sent it to be judged by the hackathon jury and then the only thing we had to do is wait for the live announcements. After a few hours of anticipation, we were announced as the winners of not only one category, but of two! We won the Best new idea category and also the overall winner category.
You can find the final pitch here
Final thoughts
Honestly, when I decided to join the hackathon, I didn’t even think about winning. My reason to participate in it was to have a fun weekend with my friends while I have my first experience of a hackathon. During the process, I got engaged with the MO project and it was a meaningful, important, and fun project to work on, which hopefully we will develop in the future.
What made this experience so great and successful was the fact that we had such a good team. We knew the limits of each one of us, so it was easy to compensate each other, and we were able to communicate openly, putting ego aside and allowing each other to say their opinion.
Another reason for all of this to work was that we followed the design thinking framework. As we are all UX/UI designers, it was just natural for us to follow the process which proved to be successful, especially when we had short limited time to work on this project. It gave us discipline and a set of tools, but that was not enough. To make them useful, they need to be used correctly. The greatness of this UX/UI team was to know which tools to use, when, and for how long.
Special thanks to my team. I learned so much from each one of you and you inspire me. Looking forward to working with you again!
To sum it up, this was a great learning experience, one which exposed me to the hackathons and startup world and opened doors for me for personal and professional future development.
