Benatna
Between Us Between Us
Roles:
UX Designer
Developer
User Researcher
Project Manager
Peer-to-peer sex education for refugees through a privacy-minded PWA.
Benatna: Between Us
Date
April 2018 - October 2018
The Pitch
Benatna is a privacy-minded progressive web app for peer-to-peer sex education designed for young refugees and new migrants. A team of young people from different cultures who answer questions about puberty, feelings, identity, and sex.
Technologies Used
Vue.js, Express.js, Non-relational JSON database, Service Workers.
Team
Cornelia Blum, Pooja Channaveerappa, Julia Maier, Hector Pahaut, Pedro Poblete Lasserre.
Funding
The project was funded by The Prototype Fund, an initiative by the Open Knowledge Fundation and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research in a six-month funding to carry out the idea from concept to demo.
The Process
Due to time constrains we collapsed the traditional design thinking process into three stages.
User Research: April 2018 - June 2018
We approached different stakeholders: NGOs serving youth refugees, academic experts, and refugees themselves.
Due to language restriction I assumed a support role, contributing by providing protocols for collecting inspirational data, created a journaling tool for longitude data collection, and designed and completed out most of the competitive analysis.
Design: June 2018 - July 2018
We approached different stakeholders: NGOs serving youth refugees, academic experts, and refugees themselves.We synthetized the learnings we had from the user research process in low-fidelity prototypes that then were tested with users to contrast our assumptions and verify our understanding of the problem. I prepared one of such prototypes.
After all results from the prototype testing were collected, I lead the organization of the information in a persona and set of possible solutions and carried out the decision making process by designing an online video survey and inviting team members to answer a PUGH decision making matrix.
Development: July 2018 - October 2018
During the final stage of the project I assumed the role of lead developer. I first chose the technology stack, which I started developing in Python Django, but then I scratched for Node.js and Express.js.
For the front-end I sticked with Vue.js from the beginning because it always fit the bill for what we needed to do.
Once the code was finalized, I wrote tests (which, yes, I should've done from the start), uploaded everything to our GitHub, and documented as much as I could in the README files.
The Impact
The app was presented in the Demo Day of PrototypeFund, and the code made feely available in GitHub for anyone to take over it. The team, however, decided to move out to different projects. As a result, Benatna never moved beyond the finalized prototype, as community building was necessary for the project to truly run.
It remains, however, as a testament of how much can be acheived in just six months.