Overview
As competing in South Florida Tech Hub 2021 Hackaton, the hackathon theme was diversity and inclusion. While it’s easy for most people to see the value in diversity and inclusion, putting those values into practice isn’t. For the average person, approaching people who, on the surface, appear to be outside of their usual social circle is daunting.
Why
The team has to create a product that would create diversity and inclusion in the workspace. We had many other ideas, but we understood that employees should have an application that is used to have in the market and have something that is fun. We believe that delaying the reveal will break the fear of feeling not part of the environment.
Team
2 x Product Designers
1 x Project Manager
3 x Full Stack Developers
Solution
Remove superficial barriers to allow employees to initiate connections based on what matters—common interests.
Build stronger bonds by delaying the reveal while employees get to know each other—introducing a social element that apps like LinkedIn fail to accomplish in networking—INTRIGUE
Ideation Workshop
This where the team comes together to create tasks, understands where the problem is, who is our users, and how we are going to solve the problem. Our project manager was there helping the team as we went. The funny thing is when we first came together, half of the team wanted to change our population.
During this workshop, we voted on the features, and compile them into a sheet, where we divided the task by components and responsibilities. We end up having three main features for this hackathon.
Construct
The team and started to break out the design into components such, the onboarding
Onboarding
Above is the splash screens that will explain what, who and how the application will help the user to feel more part of the team or environment.
The user will have to sign using their company and their identity will have to verified during the company database to make sure that no external users can make an account to use FreshBonds.
Questions to build your match
Before the user can start matching the user must answer some questions based on the users background. User are most likely to feel more algin to build more real connections when they both feel as they come from the same history.
Questions to get know you better
When building the original idea and questions, we believed that we need to build each user profile with more meaningful questions. So, that we are matching correctly. These are questions are base off personal reference such as coffee, food and also off personality questionnaires (that one the coaches recommend to add)
To Keep Unbiased
The problem that we are trying to solve is how do we making more authentic connections with your coworkers with have biased with someone who might be higher brand or have higher title. Which the team believed that we should allow the user to pick avatar that best suits. Allows each party to really get to know each without appearance or biases.
Let’s Start Swiping
Once you have completed your account by answering those prompts, you will be able see other people bio’s. If you want to get to know the user more you would swipe to left and if you do not you will swipe to the left.
Authentic Connections
To value the idea of having real connections, the team believes that both users must ask three questions before the identity is revealed. This would remove the fear of being unable to ask questions because of their title or seniority within the company.
This break the not feeling part of a company.
Future Features
Did we win grand prize?
After spending two days which felt like one long day. Moment where I felt we would get done with the code part because our team only had two senior developers who were help the other developers. Moment where I was questioning my design ability and my User Experience ability. However, my team was great and coaches were super supportive.
We did not win the grand prize but we did win third place of $1,500.00.
It was great experience!
Check out the article that was written by Tech Hub South Florida below!
Click here to view the article.