In June 2022, I attended the Athena Hackathon in London. Five of the sponsors came up with 5 themes, each team had to pick a theme and then had 24 hours to work on a project based on this theme.

We were a team of 2 UX designers and 3 developers. It was our first time working together and we were all very new in our respective fields at the time.

My role

Team

Context

Tools

Project duration

Business goal

We chose the theme by the company Beamery: Improving refugee access to work, skills and careers.

Problem statement

Refugees need a way to find support in a new country in their language, start applying for jobs, translate their skills, and fill out some work-related paperwork.

A hard time choosing the problem we wanted to solve

We started the hackathon by exploring all the themes available, brainstorming ideas, and talking to a few of the sponsors and partners.

We had A LOT of ideas, that we talked about for a long time, without being able to settle on anything. Talking about it seemed to only generate more ideas...


As I have experience in workshop facilitation and also have worked on a project with a UX team before, I offered to do a few exercises to narrow it down and make a final choice:

I had the idea of doing a crazy 8-inspired exercise and dot voting to settle on a theme and a more specific idea as the theme was broad.

This was a success and we managed to choose the Beamery theme: “Improving refugee access to work, skills and careers” and set our goals.

A quick word about Beamery

Beamery is a talent acquisition, engagement, and retention platform that manages the sourcing, hiring, and retaining of people. Beamery’s skills-based AI helps recruiters identify talent with the right skills.

🎯 High-level goals

• Connect refugees with career advisors and offer them to have a conversation in their language.

• Help refugees translate their skills, and find job opportunities in a new country.

• Make the process of settling in a new country and finding a new job less overwhelming for people speaking a foreign language.

Limited time and resources to learn about our users

Due to the context of the project, we weren’t able to directly be in contact with users and had to research articles about refugees sharing their experiences, and talk to Beamery about the experience they have had with refugees to make sure we could get to know our users even indirectly.


I then suggested that we create a proto-persona as it was only based on the company’s existing knowledge and we couldn’t base our work on research we did with the users.

This step was necessary to understand what a refugee’s goals, needs, and frustrations could be when arriving in a new country, new system (for job search, paperwork etc), and surrounded by people who don’t speak their language.

As our users are experiencing a life-changing and traumatising experience, my UX designer teammate suggested that we do an empathy mapping, mainly based on the information we got from our stakeholders.

This was used to reflect on what refugees could see, feel, think, say, do, and hear, in such a difficult situation, to build a product that could be useful for them.

🧐 What could we build to help refugees like Kateryna connect with career advisors?

We also met with the team at Vonage, a global provider of cloud communication solutions for consumers and businesses, that allows customers to connect and communicate on any device through cloud-hosted voice, video, chat and SMS.

The meeting led us to the idea of creating a video call platform with live caption translation to help refugees connect with career advisors, and so that refugees could be able to find support in their language.

Determining the WHO, WHAT, WHY, WHERE, WHEN and HOW

I suggested that we do this quick exercise to make sure everyone in the team (designers and developers) was on the same page about everything.

How might we…

Figuring out how Kateryna would use the video call platform

We mapped Kateryna’s journey as we wanted to understand Kateryna’s behaviour when using the website, what the pain points could be, uncover gaps in her experience when starting her first call, and take action to optimise her experience.

What screens could we design for Kateryna to complete her first video call?

What would the screens look like ?

I drew the sketches on the board, and we made design decisions with the whole team together.

Developers asked us how the screens would be structured to code the HTML part of the website, knowing the kind of images and icons would be on the interface.

Developers told us that it would be easier for them if we used emojis in priority and icons only where needed (like the “start call” icon that is universally understood), as emojis are coded as text, which is easier to code.

We (UX designers), started the mid-fidelity prototype, set up a grid and shared the file with developers for them to start coding.

Mid-fidelity:

Grid:

A closer look at the solutions we designed for Kateryna

Not being able to test our prototype with the right audience

We tested our prototype with people who were participating to the hackathon as they were the participants that were available at that moment in time.

The 4 participants were all speaking English and weren’t in the situation that refugees face, however, some of them were immigrants and had to face settling in a new country. The tests were all moderated and in-person, and were quite informal, participants didn’t have much time for the tests, so they were all quick.

So, what did we test?

Participants tested the main user flow to start a call with a career advisor like Kateryna would do.

Our goal at that moment was to see if the user flow worked and made sense, to see if there was anything urgent to iterate. A lot of the prototypes still had to be coded so we didn’t have time to iterate anything that wasn’t a usability catastrophe or major usability issue as we had to hand off to developers.

All participants managed to go through all the tasks without difficulties. We however got some feedback for future changes that could help improve the platform. We did not make any iterations on the day.

Time to submit!

Developers finished coding the prototype and we (designers) prepared the presentation and my designer teammate made the walkthrough video.

We finally submitted it, just on time for the deadline!

Learnings

• Continuously communicating with developers is key.

• I managed to successfully hand off to developers thanks to good communication.

• I can facilitate a brainstorming session with a team of designers and developers.

What would I do differently?

• If we had had more time I would have done more user research, interview users, test the platform with refugees that are now settled in the UK and have faced this experience in the past.

• As it was my first time working with a team, I was a bit intimidated at the start, if I could do anything differently I would start facilitating the brainstorming session earlier on as we lost a lot of time not being able to settle anything and going in all directions.

• I would research what kind of platform refugees are more likely to use as I am not sure many of them would have access to a laptop.