THE CHALLENGE
P&G in association with AngelHack ran a hackathon in Barcelona, themed "Lady problems". The team was created ad-hoc, including two developers, a business consultant and myself as an UX consultant. I choose to participate as one of the topics was of personal interest to me, namely investigating sexual health for women over 50, seen as a taboo in our current days.
In a hackathon context you have a very short time to investigate and understand the challenge proposed, as you have to start designing and developing the concept. Due to the fact that the team was diverse, we managed to spilt tasks: while some did desk research to investigate women's sexual and reproductive health issues and talking to the 'client' (the sponsors of the theme were a wellbeing company), some looked into technological features that could advance our concept (like the sentiment analysis machine learning algorythm).
Using design thinking, the team mananed to go from understanging the challenge (by taking to the present stakeholders, researching online), to ideation and quick prototyping. In the prototyping stage, the team incorporated some possible features required in the contest (like the 'sentiment analysis' algorythm), to demonstrate the power of predicitve analysis in a future sofware product. We believed that by having an algorythm that could analyse customers' feelings from the written input they would create online, on the platform, we could tailor the products offering to them.
THE OUTCOME
The concept (see project page here) we developed - called Emily- was an integrative health platform for women, a marketplace for medical professionals and not only, to sell and promote their products and connect to women. The mid-fidelity prototype won first prize, tickets to the "4 Years from Now" conference in Barcelona, a possibility to enter an accelerator and mentoring from companies in Barcelona.
THE IMPACT
The team continued the project some time after the hackathon, doing qualitative research with women over 50 in Barcelona. Because of lack of resources, this project stopped after the research phase. Persoanlly, I have learned a lot about the topic and uncovered unmet needs that I believe could serve as a future most-needed initiative.
