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Connekt Language App
TH.0 Hackathon Mar 22
Language lessons for refugees
Role UX Researcher / Team facilitator / UX Designer
Sector Refugees / Education
Challenge To make resettlement easier for displaced refugee children.
Timeframe 48 hours
Hackathon
Event / Location - Online 48hr International Women's Hackathon.
Team - Assigned on entry by organiser.
Brief - Brainstorm to find solutions to aid Ukrainian refugees.
Method - Agile - Zoom, Miro, google slides, figma, discord.
Meet the team - Refulingo
Jasmine
Belgium
Business Management /
Marketing - Student
Dhawani
India
UX Designer
Alison
Canada
UX / UI Designer
Frances
UK
UX Researcher Designer
All of our team were new to UX and this was our first Hackathon.
The challenge
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Potentially 2.5 million Ukranian children would be resettled into a new country.
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We needed to find our teams unique perspective and focus on one issue.
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The organiser suggested using our strengths - youth work and one of us had been a child refugee.
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With the focus for our challenge decided - learning a new language for refugee children resettling in host countries.
Double diamond design process
Our team used the double diamond design process.
The work was divided between us -​
User interviews / persona
Competitors
Road map building blocks
Low fi prototype
Hi fi prototype
Focus - user interviews
Carrying out rapid user interviews we gained more focus and insights on the challenge.
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Ukrainians speak two languages 70 % Ukrainian + 30 % Russian.
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Most children have access to mobile devices.
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Refugee children aged 10 - 16 years feel the impact of language barrier the most in new host countries.
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Refugees need to feel a connection to their own community.
Affinity Map
We used an affinity map for recurrent themes
Affinity Map
We used an affinity map for recurrent themes
Persona and user journey
Having interviewees who had been child refugees was invaluable, we were able to pull together a persona and user journey.
Define the issue
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Need to Learn language rapidly.
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Refugees in multiple host countries.
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Need to connect to other Ukrainians.
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Mobile device.
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Teachers are key for motivating to learn.
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Living with trauma and anxiety issues.
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Children aged 10 - 16 yrs target group.
HMW - help Ukrainian children aged 10 - 16 yrs overcome language barriers in their host country ?
Idea - Language app that connects to a teacher and other Ukrainian children for online lessons in first language.
Competitors
​Duolingo
+ Free
+ visual
+ mobile
+ free
- Subscription
- No community links
- No mental health support
- No realtime lessons / teacher
Kidslingo
+ Visual,
+ child centric
+ mobile
- Subscription fees
- No community links
- No mental health support
- No realtime lessons / teacher
Indirect Competitor
Natakallam
+ online community
+ online lessons
+ Teachers
+ Hires displaced refugees as teachers
- Arabic only * prior to March 22
- Adult focused
Decide priority features
Using Miro we laid out the features and voted.
Ideally we would have benefited from developers / coders in our team.
Develop sketches and ideation
Balsmiq was used to put together and share some lo fi ideas.
Develop user wireflows
Miro helped us visualise user / task wireflows.
Time limited the UI team opted for option 1
Hi - fi prototype
Our UI Design team put together the Hi fidelity prototype in Figma
Lessons
​
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The hackathon gave us experience of agile / sprint.
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Our team spent too long looking at the wider issues.
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Narrowing the focus on one issue actually gave us more ideas.
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First hand user experience allowed us to gain rapid insights and access interviewees.
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Different backgrounds and skills makes a stronger team.
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Natakallam the Arab language service incorporated Ukranian speakers into its programme to help with the Ukrainian refugee crisis.
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