Digital

June Hackathon

June 4, 2015 by Jono Ellis No Comments | Category Digital Public Services, mygov.scot

This is a post by Alex Cunningham, our Communications Administrator

Last week, the mygov.scot team embarked on another one of its infamous hackathons. The hugely successful two-day event included a lot of design, development and dedication, and (keeping with tradition) a lot of pizza!

A few days before the hackathon team members started to jot down their ideas. On Thursday morning, like children rummaging through their stockings on Christmas day, we checked the board on the first hackday to find it filled to the brim with awesome ideas.

 

Having a bounty of presents, we had to decide which three ideas to take forward. The contributors each took 30 seconds to pitch their idea before a democratic vote.

The 3 successful candidates were:

 – The GeekPeek app!

– The ability to save and store results when using the mygov.scot Business Rates Calculator

– A ‘Minority Report’ style sitemap!

Everyone divided up into teams, each with a range of different skills, and set off to work.

Our first idea was to set up the GeekPeek App to test it’s viability as a tool to the team. Mark Caulfield, Lead Front End Developer, gives us more information about the product and its background.

Developers would like to be able to easily share progress on a new feature to stakeholders; GeekPeek enables anyone to view a developer’s recent commits to the main product line, and crucially, to view the latest work live from the developer’s PC before it is available to view on the test servers. This allows everyone to have an instant view of current progress, whilst enjoying a quick develop/approve/modify cycle. GeekPeek is a third-party tool which works on both mobile and desktop browsers and can be a deployable android and IOS application. For styling, GeekPeek uses Google’s Material Design guidelines. It uses angular JS to handle user interactions and data fetching/refreshing.

Rachel Patrick, Digital Designer, created custom avatars (pictured on left below). Rajesh Yarlagadda, Test Engineer, and myself created the software by pair-programming on my Mac.

The software was well received at the hackathon demo – the tool is ideal for UX, designers and external stakeholders to use and will be taken forward for internal use.

The second idea was some design tweaks for the Business Rates Calculator and Chay Nicholson, Creative Lead, gave us more information on its development.

You are the hero

The best thing about being told a funny joke is being able to recall it in the correct order and making a friend laugh. And that defines the success of YouTube – see a funny video, share it with a friend – they laugh. You are the hero. In the world of mygov.scot we replace ‘the laugh’ with ‘oh that’s really useful’. When the user has a piece of information in their safe-keeping and they decide to forward it on, they then become the hero.

Lost property

Taking the Business Rates Calculator as an example, we looked at a way to allow users to save their results. The Business Rates Calculator allows users to find out rates on business premises. A simple 3-step process displays the rateable value, relief applied and net liability at the final stage. As it currently stands there is a call to action (CTA) taking the user to the relevant local authority website. At this point the user is no longer able to view their original rate calculation. Our idea was to make this a more rewarding experience by allowing the user to easily capture this information for reference at a later stage. We looked at introducing a clear option up-front where the user could email a copy of the results to themselves. To test this idea we made some enhancements to the UI and hierarchy and focussed on maintaining visual consistency from web to email. Meanwhile back-end groundwork was being carried out on email capture and data storage. It’s not earth-shattering, but the point of this hack was to create the most fulfilling endpoint for the user and test the ground for potential deployment across other areas of the site.

Push the envelope

People use their email inbox as a filing system and a source of reference; by the simplest method of entering an email address and hitting ‘go’, we have taken away the need to jot down info on the back of an envelope. We are creating digital services and first we should look for a complete digital solution, provided that is the most satisfying user experience.

To have the edge

A strong focus on the UX and the UI addresses the ever-recurring U2 problem – “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for”. Well… here’s what you’re looking for, and by the way, do you want to save that for later?

Our last product demo was the ‘Minority Report’-style board for displaying our website sitemap. Scott Langley, Senior UX Designer, has given us more information on this idea’s history.

We wanted a tool to help our team explore the mygov.scot site content – we decided to build a gesture controlled tool, similar to the one in the film “Minority Report”.

To make it possible to see at a glance how content is grouped (and the connections and relationships that may exist between content items). The User Experience team also wanted to encourage and promote group discussions around the information architecture and bring the sitemap to life in an interactive way.

We created a version of the sitemap in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format and used the D3.js JavaScript library to visualise and manipulate the data in a web page. The new sitemap was hosted on an NGINX web server running on a Raspberry Pi. We viewed the sitemap in Internet Explorer on a Microsoft Xbox One and were able to navigate it with hand gestures using Microsoft Kinect.

Commenting on the hackathon, Jose Casal-Gimenez, Programme Director for mygov.scot said:

“Going home buzzing with joy about how awesome the mygov.scot people can be. Running hackathons is a great way for teams to investigate new ideas, to unleash the creativity of people and to foster the kind of collaborative and enjoyable environment we all strive for.”

The event was a massive success with excellent pieces of work produced in just 2 days. Congratulations to everyone involved with this hackathon you have really outdone yourselves. It is a pleasure to be working with such amazingly creative people.

We’ll be sharing updates on these features, and much more on social, so follow the team via @mygovscot on Twitter for more updates. Want to comment? Let us know below!

Tags: Product

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