#UX4Change Hackathon

If you were given the task of creating personas to design sustainable technology for a humanitarian cause, how would you go about it? Where would you start? How much research it's enough research in a lean environment? What is the purpose of creating personas, anyways?

On our next UX for Change event, we will be take on the challenge of creating personas that reflect women like 18-year-old Maryam, a Syrian refugee from Aleppo who is seven months pregnant and has arrived to Lebanon, without any access to the vital pre-natal information.

UNICEF estimates that approximately 4% of a displaced population will be pregnant at a given time, of which approximately 15% will experience complications.

UX for Change is currently partnering with the HaBaby app team. HaBaby aims to support pregnant refugees during their journey through different countries by providing a list of symptoms, actions to take and multilingual support in order to ease the communication with health care providers, who may or may not speak their language. 

Sounds interesting? Well, here is what we have planed for the evening.

We will kick off with a talk by one of the organisers of EmpowerHack, Hera Hussain. Hera will be sharing the motivation behind EmpowerHack, the community behind HaBaby, dedicated to create sustainable design for humanitarian crisis using technology, and in particular the HaBaby app project.

Immediately after, Lean Personas guru, Adrian Howard, will be giving a presentation on how to create Lean Personas in order to enable all of us to take on the challenge of creating personas for HaBaby.

We will then, work in teams and with the help of Adrian and some other Subject Matter Experts (SEMs) available during the event, we will build Lean Personas with the hopes of helping the HaBaby project shape their design decisions.

Just like all our other events, there will be prizes for the best team as well as digital badges for participating in the event. Also, refunds for the price of the ticket will be available only for those who show up to the event. 

Speakers Bio

 Adrian Howard @adrianh

Adrian is passionate about building effective teams and great products. He co-founded Quietstars to help organisations do that, using Lean, Agile and User Experience practices.

You'll find Adrian working with startup and product development teams — doing everything from coaching & teaching to hands on user experience & development work.

With more than fifteen years experience working with startups, established businesses and agencies Adrian is an active member of the Agile and Lean UX communities. He organised the UX Stage at the Agile 2010 and Agile 2012 conferences, and regularly teaches and speaks on integrating Lean, UX and Agile methods. He's also a mentor for Lean Startup Machine and speakup.io.

Hera Hussain @herahussain

Hera is the Founder of Chayn, an open source gender and tech project that builds platforms, toolkits and runs hackathons to empower women facing violence & the organisations supporting them. Raised in Pakistan and living in London, Hera knew from early on she wanted to empower women found herself drawn to tech start-ups and how technology can be utilised to solve social issues. She is also a keen member of social innovation networks such as  Wikipedia, MakeSense, Startingbloc, WEF's Global Shapers and Yunus&Youth. Hera was named one of the 17 Local Globalists by GOOD magazine, presented by UN Foundation.