UKvsCovidHack — Connected Learning

This weekend I took part in my first hackathon. See this medium post for the official post about Connected Learning and the other projects from the Hackathon, and view the final website here.

I was compelled to join this hackathon because it is hard to avoid how our daily lives has completed changed. Everyone, no matter what they do, has to keep adapting to the new and ever-changing conditions. There are so many design possibilities about how we will adjust after this is all over and we return to “normalcy” in whatever form it takes. But for now, while many people are struggling to complete their day to day tasks- it is vital that all of us work together to help those who need it. One way that I could think of doing this was to join an incredible team of women, connect-educate, to tackle the challenges that a Maslaha representative presented during the pre-hack, summarised below.

Problems:

• Parents have acquired an (additional) full time job to teach their children.
• New technology (Google Classroom, Microsoft 365, Facebook, YouTube) all provide information, but it is a mass of resources with no direction.
• Parents isolated to teach their children on their own and to find things to not only fill their days with but also to contribute to their education and needs.
• Parents having limited physical resources and space to work with out of their homes.
• Parents may be conversational in English but do not know how to teach additional subjects or navigate resources in it.
• Parents having to explain to children why they have been isolated from all of their friends.

Solution:

Connected Learning is a platform that helps parents to access mentors and online resources to support their children’s needs and wellbeing. Some of the main things that we wanted to tackle during this hackathon were:

• Simple use of English to help non-native speakers to navigate the site as efficiently as native speakers.
• A quick CTA for parents to ask questions to mentors, and a way to receive feedback from mentors.
• An offline SMS journey for parents who do not have access to the internet.

My role:

As someone who was not able to take part in the coding, I had an interesting challenge of how to be useful and best feed information into the developers. It was hard starting a project at the very beginning knowing that with the time available, it would not be a pure UX process. Before the hackathon began, we had a quick intro meeting to discuss the user stories and what we hoped to achieve. This insight would then help me to create the original wireframes.

User stories:
- Parent- Raise a query and track the response, or have a conversation to ask further questions.
- Volunteer- Respond to requests from parents.
- Admin- Ensure volunteers meet safe guarding requirements, manage queries from online and offline channel.

From this, we had some initial sketches about pages that were wanted and then it was up to me to create some wireframes while the dev team got github and all of their software together and ready. I have worked on many conceptual projects, but as I opened up a new Figma screen there was a moment of panic of whether I had the skills needed to be of any help.

The final product from me was a sequence of wireframes for the parent and for the volunteer- both in desktop and mobile.

Parent Journey to create and view response of a query

UX Challenges:

• I joined the team after the solution was chosen, so it was interesting to start the project with a solution in mind and not being presented with the research and tasked to find a solution.
• Within the timeframe, research was limited to competitive analysis and I really missed talking to parents/users about what challenges they were experiencing to see if our solution was still too technologically advanced to solve it.
• Similarly, testing was only applicable within the team and from a critical eye while knowing the intention. Some usability testing, especially with those fluent in English, is crucial to make sure our product can be used with the intended audience.
• Within design, I have often taken for granted having people around to run ideas by, and that was something that was more of a challenge due to the remote capacity vs. being the only UX designer on the team. There were a few different journeys that the team had discussed on the original call, and it was hard to narrow that down to the MVP without more research about with journey to prioritise.
• A big mistake that I made was not drafting a journey and getting it confirmed with the team before the hackathon started.
• I am a big advocate of clean and crisp UI, and I would still love to take this project to the next level with the graphics that Fiona made and to design the interfaces in high fidelity.

The team:

Our team was a diverse and incredible group of women. I was constantly amazed with how little information they needed before they were ready to start coding. Everyone really was dedicated and brought all of their skill sets to the table. It was an enriching experience, and I look forward to taking part in a hackathon in person, once we are allowed out.

Our remote team

Myself: LinkedIn, Website, Aisha D’Souza: GitHub, Twitter, LinkedIn, Fiona Mitchell: GitHub, LinkedIn, Ines Guerrero: GitHub, Twitter, LinkedIn, Latifa Akay (Mentor): Twitter, LinkedIn, Melenie Schatynski: Twitter, LinkedIn, Michelle Brien: GitHub, Twitter, LinkedIn, Mindy Jhakra (Organiser): GitHub, LinkedIn, Rebecca Fitzsimmons: GitHub, Sandeep Thandi: LinkedIn,Win San Pang: GitHub, LinkedIn