A girl in tech.

Hey there,

so this post is well overdue but recently I had the opportunity to attend a two-day workshop on Design Thinking beautifully organized by Girls in tech right here in Gibraltar.

It was definitely a learning experience and an incredible pleasure to meet everyone who participated.
My team was awesome. Very talented women of different backgrounds and professions – a developer, a business analyst, a project manager.
The moderator was the super cool and funky Katie Edmonds.

To cut to the chase. We formed 7 teams of roughly 5 people. The problem we were trying to solve was:

How might we look to technology to help us engage with our neighbors in a way that takes advantage of the special opportunity of being together in the same place?

The process we were sticking to was the following:

Now I need to be completely honest here and say that, as in every team, company, or community, things did not always go smoothly. We had a few bumps down the road, some disagreements. Which as in every real-life situation slows things down and means your product could have ended up being a tiny bit better. That said it turned out ok, but I will let you be the judge of that.

Turn an observation into a clear definition of an opportunity

Working individually each of us started thinking about neighbors, communities, the first thing that came to mind. Everyone had their experiences and their pain points. We felt like a common problem we all had was being ex-pats in a country where not always everything is clear especially when you don’t know the language.

See the opportunity from different perspectives to understand it as best you can

We exchanged our notes and a consensus was reached – we want to talk about neighbors within Spanish housing urbanization with different backgrounds and goals.

We went ahead and created some personas. Mine was Linda –  a single working mom who just moved into a new urbanization. Not knowing anyone, experiencing a lot of issues in her apartment, and struggling to understand how it all works and what the rules are. Linda also enjoyed a glass of wine in the evening…occasionally.  There was Alvaro who was my son who didn’t care about any of this. We had Paqui and her husband. Paqui was extremely tech-savvy for her age  (70), very friendly, loved children, had a little garden and the whole time in the world. Her husband also had all the time in the word and didn’t care about any of these things. We also had a newlywed couple with a lot of issues in their apartment and a noisy neighbor.

Ask “What if” to develop new ideas and communicate them clearly

Well, this took us a while. We spent a lot of time organizing our thoughts and everyone was pulling into their own direction. Initially, we wanted it to be “What if we used technology to bring communities together”.  Then it turned into “What if we created a portal where communities can communicate and find relevant information”. At this point, we completely spiraled into different directions, and took us quite a while to get back on track. Some wanted it to be an app/website which provided information about hospitals, schools, shops, etc in the area, but this took us away from our initial conversations.

Distill ideas to notice the themes embedded in them

We did find a few common themes:

• how can people help one another within a community – can they perhaps share skills, goods, etc?

• a language barrier – something all of us have experienced and are experiencing almost on a daily basis.

• knowing what the rules within the community are

Transform worries into design features

We were not the only team thinking about the concept sharing between neighbors. What made our project stand out, in my opinion, are a few quite helpful features.

The user would get their own profile with a bit of information about themselves, where they live within the community, what kind of service they can provide, e.g. one is a handyman, one a gardener, one childcarer. They can add video cards, their services would be rated. The app would also provide an interactive map of the neighborhood, information about the set of rules within the urbanization, etc.

Most importantly a chat with integrated translation functionality for them to communicate freely breaking the language barrier. Ability to schedule meetings within the chat with proposed time and place.

Test concepts and apply learnings by building new versions of your idea

We were not left with much time to test or iterate on our ideas.

Present to surprise and delight your audiences

The presentation was fun. A team member had built a welcome box. The user would get some helpful info about the app along with a QR code which would lead them to download the community’s app.

We presented the app screens as well describing our idea. Fun 5-minute presentation. Had a lot of laughs 🙂

And the grand finale

A well-deserved Mojito.