Bringing inclusivity to the community
Helping refugees rebuild their lives with the help of local resources
3
Hour design competition
The short version
As a team of two my partner and I attended the Adobe Creative Jam which is a 3 hour sprint to create some sort of app solution related to a theme. The theme of the event was "Without caring, there can be no sense of community". Our idea was that by providing access to community driven support and information, it can enable immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers to succeed. We created WeBelong to accomplish this, which provides people with access to education, opportunities for work, local events and ways for the community to get involved.
See the journey below or
What the event is about
1. 8 teams of 2 are invited to participate in the design event & the theme of the event is revealed
2. Teams have 3 hours to complete their UX design and are required to use Adobe XD to create an iPhone prototype. The are no other rules.
3. Each team then presents their work to a panel of design judges as well as the audience.
4. The audience votes for their favorite design and judges choose the top 2 winners
The Starting Line
The theme is revealed to the teams and it is:
"Without caring, there can be no sense of community"
3 Hours left
Our Focus Group
....and With that we're off to the races. Once we sat down we immediately began to brain storm some ideas. My partner suggested that we focus on those have lost their community by coming to the U.S.A as an immigrant, refugee or asylum seeker. With that in mind, we began to brainstorm again on how we would do this.
2 hours & 30 minutes left
The MVP
After much deliberation and with the tock clicking down we decided on narrowing it down to giving people a way to access the following so we created the following MVPs:
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Creative community
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Foundations
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Networking
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Ways to volunteer
The paper scribbles we did throughout the 3 hours
2 hours left
The Research
With all of this established we started doing some comparative and competitive analysis. We looked at the following two non-profits. They both offered a number of things detailed below.
While the foundation does not support refugees or aslyum seekers directly, we were able to gather ideas on what services or resources we should offer people.
Welcoming America offers technical assistance to organizations and communities looking to offer support and understanding to refugees.
1 hours & 30 minutes left
Consolidation
With some research completed we finalized the following that would be in the app:
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Education to either help them learn english or new skills
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Opportunities for work or utilize people who have volunteered a skill,
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Events for either networking or fun festivities happening near by
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A way for people to get involved by hosting events, lending skills, or anything else that might be helpful.
Holá
你好
नमस्ते
Привет
שלום
مرحبا
1 hours left
Accessibility
As we're inching our way closer to the finishing line we needed to figure out how to best represent this in our design materials. What we ended up thinking about was making sure that there are as little text that they need to read navigating the app since many apps in the beginning are somewhat limited when it comes to translating to other languages.
45 minutes left
The Design
We also wanted to make sure that the buttons are large and easy to recognize so it had to follow normal conventions that are easy to recognize. As well as having colors that are neutral and calming for these stressful situations.
30 minutes left
The UI Elements
As the walls are closing in on us and as much as we would love to have come up with all the assets ourselves the clock was ticking. So we used UI kits for the iPhone to speed up our design process.
15 minutes left
Illustrations
Illustrations
In addition we also used a number of great plugins in Adobe XD
5 minutes left
Deliverables
Our deliverables must include a text file with 3 sentences of what our app is about as well as a link to a working prototype and the file itself.
1 minutes left
The Final Countdown*
*cue music
we finalized the colors, wrote everything out and placed it on the provided usb drive. we turned it in with a minute to spare.
0 minutes left
The End & Solution
This is our app. weBelong
*The version you see here has slight updated colors
We unfortunately did not win, but we did learn a lot during the competition. Things such as not getting hung up on the nitty gritty details when you're trying to create a quick prototype and have a broader sense of the project. Having a good sense of the navigation can make or break the app. Finally, communication is key and it was great being able to talk and bounce back ideas with my partner and plan out what task we were both going to accomplish to hit the deadline.
Here are the weBelong screens. Please note that the colors are slightly different from the turned in file.
