Design Hackathon was a two-day hybrid meeting of students from the first year of the Design of Information Services program at  MUNI KISK. From Friday to Saturday ( February 27th to 28th, 2023) together with my team ( Kača, Tomáš, Bára, Kája, Katka, Tereza, Míša, Maya, Pepa), we went through the process of design thinking with the aim of going through all phases of the double diamond.

 

Part 1 - Discover:
User research was conducted prior to the hackathon using two surveys - one for students of online courses and one for creators of online courses.
Data collected included 47 responses from students, 8 responses from creators, 6 in-depth interviews, 2 online courses analyzed, 3 online courses viewed from an admin perspective, resources from the magazine Corporate Education, and many ideas and background materials shared by the team in Teams, Notion, and on the Shared Drive.

Part 2 - Define:
 The topics were separated into two parts: identifying the target groups related to the topic and determining the issues uncovered through research. The data were organized and grouped into relevant themes using Miro, and the most pressing problem was selected through dot voting. Finally, the team used the "how could we...?" technique to establish the final design challenge for the hackathon.

Part 3 - Ideation:
We used Crazy 8, brainwriting, and dot voting techniques. For the resulting ideas, we created a matrix where we evaluated the contribution to our design challenge (How could we turn online course creators into online learning designers? ) and also evaluated the feasibility and complexity of the idea.  

Part 4 - Prototyping:
 In this phase we have discovered that meeting the design challenge requires more than just one product, instead, it necessitates a complete process. The foundation of the product will be a checklist that assists online course creators in ensuring that no steps in the assembly process are missed and provides methodological support and direction on what to do at each stage. This checklist can then be expanded into an online format, such as a supportive learning platform, a guidance chatbot, and AI suggestions that can help with user research data, tool and platform choices, and content development for the online course.

Part 5 - Iteration:
 We have reached out to four online course creators to validate the idea. We were able to connect with one creator online and three others in person. During the first iteration, we realized that creators who already have at least one online course are not our target users.

Conclusion: 

Even though we didn't create the final product, we worked as a team and successfully tried double diamond and other design techniques. We established a prototype of a checklist for course creators that could be improved in the future. Overall, it was a wonderful experience that served as a pleasant introduction to a new method of thinking that I will use in my (not only) architectural work.