Friday, March 9, 2012

Panic Over – Social Innovation wins the day


Lindsay Ratcliffe & guest contributor Jill Irving

ThoughtWorks were invited to participate in design-powerhouse IDEO’s first London-based Make-a-thon, which ran over two days in February. We jumped at the opportunity to collaborate and provide some of our agile application design and development experts to the event.

The ThoughtWorks-strong team went on to win ‘best pitch’ having designed and delivered an interactive web-hosted prototype demonstrate the Amnesty International ‘Panic Button App’ concept in less than day. The team built an alert app and platform for signalling at risk situations using Google Maps and HTML5 technologies. Accessible via mobile browsers by those at risk, individuals can hit the alert button to register when they’re in danger of being taken, sending their location and details. A group of volunteers then monitors the platform and in turn notifies the relevant local organisations.

Making the IDEO Way

The Make-a-thon was the brain-child of Haiyan Zhang, OpenIDEO Design Lead. The idea was to reinvent the ‘hack-a-thon’, keeping collaboration open, but by adding a more of a flavour of design methods and human-centred principles than a typical hack-a-thon would do. The event was a great blend the best of design jams and hack-a-thons as it brought together end-users with design talent, business minds and experienced developers to solve social impact problems in an offline open-collaboration forum.

To start there were eight challenges in all attracting teams of about six people each. Despite the fact the event was self-organising most challenges managed to attract a balanced team with members of diverse yet complimentary skill sets. The first day was spent exploring the briefs with divergent brainstorming and rough prototyping before presenting the initial ideas to the rest of the group. Then on the second day the teams refined their ideas to produce an experience prototype, which was then tested with on-site users or out in the real-world where possible.

Setting the Challenges

In September 2011, Amnesty International in collaboration with IDEO launched an open innovation challenge on the OpenIDEO forum - an online forum for promoting open social collaboration. The challenge was to identify and define ways that technology could be used to help people working to uphold human rights in the face of unlawful detention. Following on from the online challenge IDEO were inspired to hold a real-world Make-a-thon to take progress to the next level.

The aim of the Make-a-thon was to experiment with cross-functional collaboration for social good while tackling a number of briefs for both Amnesty International as well as some local community design challenges. These included making the London Bike Hire scheme (fondly known locally as Boris bikes) more user-friendly for tourists and making it safer for cyclists in London.

Exploring new Ways to Help Amnesty International

The event was a great platform for Amnesty International to explore new ways for people to give to the cause other making a donation or letter writing campaigns. As described by Owen Pringle, Director, Digital Communications at Amnesty International, ‘our traditional model is one of responding: a human rights incident occurs, we send in a subject matter expert and we use the evidence that we gather to affect policy change at a government level – it’s what we’re good at…however we also want to focus on the rights holder and be able to proactively intervene or prevent violations occurring if possible.’

With the Amnesty challenges, the organisers were aware that human rights issues and situations are often difficult. So IDEO and Amnesty collaborated to produce the guiding principles of optimism, solution-focussed and respectful to give the event a sense of purpose and direction.

One of the major differences of the Make-a-thon was the inclusion of users. In the case of the Amnesty challenges the teams had direct access to people who had first-hand experience of being unlawfully detained and interrogated. This was invaluable to help the team understand the emotions, needs, context, environment and constraints, and in fact the whole premise behind user-centred design. The users, along with the business representatives, provided information and stimulus for the concept generation but also feedback as to the suitability and viability of the products as they were designed and developed.

From Pitch to Prototype

The ThoughtWorks strong team, who won ‘best-pitch’, built a mobile web application nicknamed ‘Panic Button App’. The app enables people at risk of unlawful detention to send an alert to a ‘buddy’ if they are in danger, which could include a message (where time ad circumstances permit) as well as their geographic location. In order to allow access for the largest range of mobile devices, it was built with HTML5 and accessed via a mobile web browser. The team also experimented with SMS technology. An important facility was being able to provide support in parts of the world that do not have access to a mobile data network, and also to make the app accessible by non-smartphone users by using the SMS network.














The ‘Panic Button App’ team – Amir, Jill & Yu from ThoughtWorks and Bianca from BBC

The team imagined several different scenarios that considered the time as the critical factor when using the app:

  • Option 1: Panic Button only – this could be used in critical situations and would take a matter of seconds.
  • Option 2: Send a pre-composed message – where time is still of the essence, but not quite as urgent as above, the user can select a pre-composed message to describe their situation. The messages can be composed at the time of registration, rather than waiting for an event to occur.
  • Option 3: Send a custom message – where time permits the user can enter a custom message to describe whatever critical information could help them in their situation. 
  • Thanks to the ThoughtWorks developers, the ‘Panic Button App’ team was able to go straight from sketching ideas with marker pens and post-it's to prototyping in code. They uploaded the app onto a cloud hosting service so that it could be used on mobile web browsers. Once the prototype was working in a live environment they tested it with users throughout the rest of the day. After refining the design and interaction based on the user input they then did a live web demonstration of the end-to-end concept to the rest of the Make-a-thon team. 

For the prototype the team made use of Google maps and developed code to track messages, showing the locations of the user as they were entered during the demonstration (although this would not be a part of the Amnesty service is this was developed fully).










Images from the ‘Panic Button App’

A Game Changer

The make-a-thon event proved to be a game changer from the perspective of the organisers at IDEO and also Amnesty as providers of some of the design challenges. The real success was the blend of all the different skills and being able to design and develop and prove concepts at speed.
Haiyan said ‘Thanks for organising to have such fab developers at our event! We couldn't have done it without them.’

Owen Pringle of Amnesty waxed lyrical about the make-a-thon saying “We want to replicate [this event] as soon as possible” He also went on to say “The prototypes were amazing…we’re keen to get one or more of the prototypes into the live environment”

ThoughtWorks were also really honoured to be invited to take part and very proud of what they achieved on the day.

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Thanks to Jill Irving for contributing to this article and helping to make the day a success from ThoughtWorks, IDEO and Amnesty’s perspective.


Jill is a, Lead User Experience Consultant and UI developer at ThoughtWorks - she has loved creating things for the web since she used Netscape 1.1. Jill proudly considers herself to be slightly geekier than your average designer — bringing a rare blend of creative and technical ability to every project.


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