Our submission to Hack Western 7 in November 2020.
The Problem
During November 2020, I had the opportunity to participate in Hack Western 7 alongside 4 other students. This is one of the largest student-run hackathons in Canada, with around 600+ participants on average.
My team and I chose to tackle RBC’s challenge, which was “How might we improve mundane life?”
Specifically, we chose to hone in on mental health and the enjoyment of daily life because the inclusion of the word “mundane” implied a very boring life lived.
As students who are often busy with schoolwork and routines, we empathized with the prompt and understood how fellow students might want a bit more “spunk” in their daily lives sometimes.
We thought that if there was a way to add more spontaneity to people’s lives, they could become less stagnant, feel happier, and find joy in the small things.
It becomes easy to slip into a routine in daily life, but this could quickly become boring.
Even small changes to your daily routine can make your day better.
The Solution
After some brainstorming, we decided on our solution: “Swap.”
Swap is a mobile app that allows people to switch routines with acquaintances and friends. Through randomizing some part of their daily lives, they would be able to experience what others experience on a day-to-day basis and not only gain more joy in trying something new but also develop more empathy for the person whose routine they adopted.
We included features such as the ability to input daily activities and photos, tracking moods (optional), adding friends, swapping schedules randomly or at scheduled intervals, and receive recommendations (either domestic or international) of new routines to try.
Ultimately, our team determined that this would be an effective solution through increasing users’ awareness, exploration, and reflection.
The Figma prototype can be viewed here. Our pitch video can be viewed here. Accompanying pitch deck: here.
Reflection & Results
This was one of my first times working with a new person in a hackathon. I knew two of my teammates from mutual friends before, but one of the team members were found from the hackathon’s Slack channel.
Through this experience, I learned how to bring together a team with different strengths. For me, I was strong in ideation and product strategy skills. For my other teammates, some of them were strong in design, another in pitch deck design, and the rest in technical skills.
Therefore, our team had to adequately talk through the solution to ensure alignment before we divided up roles and fulfilled our separate parts. We made sure we were on the same page by asking and encouraging questions, as well as narrowing down the specific features that needed to be built.
The end result was a wonderful combination of product innovation backed by amazing design and feasibility-proof from an entity-relationship diagram (ER diagram). This helped the judges not only envision our product but also see why it would be effective and understand how it might be implemented.
As a result, we won “Best in Category” award and RBC awarded us $500 each!
It was a great chance for me to learn how to better acquaint myself with new individuals in a team setting, especially those with technical expertise who come with their own type of product questions.