Case study: HackTheCrisis in India Hackathon
It was at the end of march when our university closed down due to the pandemic and all students were sent home for an indefinite period. The classes continued in the online mode but the daily exciting college life was gone. Everyday became monotonous with the same routine being followed. The boredom was at it’s peak but there was hardly one could do at that time let alone go out and take in some fresh air. It was around the 30th of March that I noticed an email from the Ministry of Electronics and Information technology was organizing “HackTheCrisis in India hackathon” in collaboration with the government of Estonia and Garage48. So, me and some of my classmates decided to participate just for the sake of getting out of the monotonous routine. The goal of the hackathon was to choose a problem that could be caused by COVID-19 in the coming year and develop a working solution for the same. There were many fields to choose from like — health, finance, automation, etc. and we chose finance, because I already had thought of an idea which seemed to have great potential.
Agenda of the hackathon
The idea submission deadline was on 2nd April and out of all the ideas submitted from across the country, top 300 were selected to be taken ahead for implementation and prototyping. Out of the 300 teams, top 30 were announced and at the end of the hackathon, 10 teams out of the 30 were declared the winners of the hackathon. The top 30 teams also automatically qualified for participation in the Global Hack , the same hackathon but with 10,000+ participants from 100+ countries!
Our team comprised of the following people:
Pranav Mitan i.e. me (UI/UX Designer and Team Lead), Ayush Singh (app developer), Kalit Inani (app developer), Shivansh Anand (backend developer), Prateek Grover (UI/UX designer), Aarjav Jain (backend developer) and Nilkamal Thakuria (frontend web developer).
Our team was named — FinHelp (short for financial help)
At the beginning, a group 10 teams were assigned a mentor . We were very grateful to be mentored by Uve Poom, CEO of SupplierPlus. All the necessary communication was being held with the help of a perfect combination of Zoom integration with Slack.
The Problem
The World comprises 400–500 million formal and informal micro, small and medium enterprises which will be incurring losses to the tune of billions of dollars due to the ongoing pandemic. The governments do not have an effective medium to reach every business, hear their problem and provide appropriate help. Small businesses are vulnerable to bankruptcy due to less profit margin and inadequate capital resources. These very small businesses which literally are the backbone of the economy are also the ones most sensitive to large scale natural disasters like COVID-19. There is a need for an effective platform for communication between the business owners and the government so that the relief providing process can be fair and smooth for everyone. Apart from a solution for providing individual financial assistance, there is also a requirement for a source of data collection to roll out mass financial schemes.
The solution
In the post-COVID era, India’s businesses will need financial support in order to recover from the long shutdown. This is our attempt to bridge the gap between the SMEs and the government by providing a complete solution for verification of losses and transfer of funds. The aim of the solution is to provide an interface to the general public where a business owner can express his/her concerns by — accounting for the losses incurred during the lockdown period, . A user would also be required to upload proper identification proofs of himself/herself as well as his/her business ventures. The developed application would consider all these factors and calculate whether a particular user is eligible or not for the Government compensation schemes. If eligible, the concerned user may communicate his/her losses through the application. The submitted applications would be thoroughly analyzed by government officials, who may then approve of appropriate financial compensation. The government portal would draw out the analytics from all the grievances submitted and then look at major areas of concern to work upon. This can lead to the faster dispensation of funds and schemes on both state and central levels. Moreover, next time such a crisis arises, the government can handle it more efficiently owing to the data collected this time. Implementing the solution on a large scale all over India would thus help to strengthen the Indian Economy back to its fully functional level. We could also add loans and tenders in addition to DBTs.
The biggest challenge
Usually, the a mobile application takes around 3–4 months to design and develop on an average but the biggest challenge of this hackathon was the time limit i.e. 48 hours
Yes, you read it right. We had only 48 hours to ideate, design and develop a running prototype of an android app to present before the jury!
Since the time was extremely limited, we needed to cut down on majority of the steps in the whole process of design because development was very necessary. If you don’t have a running prototype, there’s no way that you would be even considered for evaluation. So, we decided to skip the following two steps in the design process:
- User interviews/research: The most obvious step to be skipped. People sometimes even take weeks to reply back to a mail and we didn’t even have 2 hours to spare. We did carry out some research but it was mostly limited to surfing the internet and discussing amongst ourselves
- Feedback/testing: There was no point of waiting for design-related feedback from people mostly because no one would be ready to test a design on such a short notice but again, we didn’t completely skip this step and did collect as much feedback possible from close friends.
#Checkpoint 1 — presenting the workplan
At 6:00 PM in the evening on 3rd April, each team lead needed to present his/her team’s workplan for the rest of the two days- which included a brief about the idea, proposed outcomes, type of solution being developed, and how did we plan to schedule our work for the coming two days. Each team’s leader was allotted 5–10 minutes for this with their respective mentors and this was a smooth sail for almost all the teams as the real challenge was yet to come.
Goals
User research
Micro, small and medium sized business owners are the most affected during any kind of natural calamity/disaster like this pandemic in a descending order (general trend). Businesses not belonging to the MSME (micro, small and medium enterprises) mostly have sufficient capital in stock to recover from sudden calamities like this but small businesses do not have such kind of funds ready for immediate consumption. According to the government, these are the following range of investments to categorize businesses:
These amounts may look significant but most of these funds are raised by taking loans from banks which come along with a heavy rate of interest. So, MSME owners are the ones who suffer the most when it comes to paying loans without any revenue generation for months. To highlight the seriousness of this issue, more than 10 farmer suicides were reported on a daily basis during 2017 & 2018 when there was no pandemic. Most of us wouldn’t even like to fathom this figure during a time of extended lockdown across the country.
Target users
Proposed user flow of the app
Rough sketches of the design
There was absolutely no time to sketch the wireframes in multiple stages and iterations as each hour was passing by like seconds and there was no time to lose. Majority of the time was devoted to directly pushing pixels and code simultaneously. So, whatever we drew as a rough sketch was the final thing. I even thought of directly starting to design in Figma but for an app with more than 20 screens, that seemed a bit too random even though we were running short on time. Hence, based upon our discussions I drew these rough sketches to get a broad overview of the entire flow.
Design
Onboarding screens
There are 3 onboarding screens which can be quickly gone through by the standard swipe gesture. The onboarding screens play an important role especially in an app which is targeted towards users which may not be very familiar/proficient with using such apps as these screens provide a very brief and crisp summary of the overall process. Each screen represents one major step of the whole process by using relevant illustrations supported by to the point one-liners with an encouraging tone. These 3 screens give the user an idea what to expect from the app and how is it beneficial to them.
Login and Signup
The login screen has the most standard design with which most people are already familiar with a login and signup button. The login button is in the filled state to highlight it. There are many instances in the app where the user needs to fill in details, therefore the screens with inputs need to be as simple and usable as possible. This is the reason why ample space has been left between all the input fields and big font size is kept so that the only attention demanding elements can be highlighted.
Business screens
One screen was just dedicated to displaying the guidelines because most of the business owners don’t happen to know the intrinsic details regarding the working and eligibility of MSMEs. Tabs were used to switch from one category of rules to another. In the business details form, AID was taken as an input because it acts as a primary (unique) key for any business to verify whether a business is registered as a MSME or not with the government records.
Once the business is verified as a MSME, the “My Business” screen opens which provides all the necessary information related to the user’s business like name , address, registration date, and type of activity undertaken etc. To attract attention and differentiate it from the rest of the screens, a greyish background is used. Since, this data can be used for any other national scheme related to business owners, an option to download has been provided. The user after checking his/her details proceeds to report the losses his/her business has faced during the pandemic.
Upload documents
The report damages screen is to take input of the amount of losses incurred during the pandemic, investment made and the annual income. These figures are then strictly verified with the documents that are uploaded in the next screen. The screen to upload documents consists of cards with information related to the type of document to be uploaded. Once uploaded, the user gets an immediate feedback in the form of a check mark which confirms the submission. After all the documents are uploaded, there is a “warning” screen which is displayed to warn the user that this is a financially sensitive process and any kind of faking of documents to get more compensation won’t be tolerated.
Dashboard
Perhaps the most significant screen after upload documents. Dashboard allows the user to view his/her progress in the overall compensation process. If all documents have been verified and the payments have been initiated, the user can view the amount that has been credited and how much remaining with the help of a progress bar which acts as a good visual aid. All the checkpoints keep on getting highlighted once they are completed on the dashboard screen.
Profile
The profile screen has three options namely — reset, funds and edit details. Since, many people are prone to make a mistake in the first or second attempt, there is an option to reset the whole process and starting again or modify details at some particular step using the edit details option. The “funds” screen is to get a more detailed view of every transaction along with an option to download receipt for each one of them for future use. The assistance screen has different categories of query assistance a user can choose from.
#Checkpoint 2 — progress updates
10:00 AM on 4th April — It was time to showcase our designs and give a progress update to the mentors. It was real difficult to be even awake at this point of time because most of us had been up for the whole night working on the app and I being the team lead had to be completely focused to present whatever progress we had made till now. Fortunately, our staying up all night had paid off well and we were absolutely ready with the design. I presented the design in Figma to Uve and several other mentors from Garage48 and answered some of the questions that they put forward. I’d say just being awake and being present made a lot of difference because quite a few number of teams couldn’t make it on time and got eliminated. As far as the questions were concerned, I answered all of them with confidence and clarity and we were declared eligible for the next checkpoint.
Development
The mobile application was developed by Ayush and Kalit using Flutter. The backend part was handled by Shivansh and Aarjav. They implemented a system of quick automated data verification using optical character recognition (OCR) and Pytesseract (Python library) and integrated a government API to check whether the companies registering are valid MSMEs or not. We had also designed a basic web portal which was to be meant for the government officials working on the other side of the service (proposed). The frontend development part was taken care of by Nilkamal. He integrated the Web portal with our servers so that the user compensation requests can be easily processed.
Checkpoint #3 Prototype presentation
6:30 PM, 4th April. The most important checkpoint was finally here where each team had to present a prototype of the product they had been working on. By this time, we had the APK ready and had already tested it a few times. You can checkout the prototype presentation + video pitch below:
This prototype consists of an older version of the design. We had made a few major changes in the design to come up with the final version for the Global Hack (next level of the same hackathon) which has been presented in this case study.
Results announced!
It was 2:30 PM on 5th April and our anxiety levels couldn’t be higher. After all we had been working constantly since the past 36 hours! Personally, I had little hope to make it to the top 30 because there were many teams which already had a readymade project to present before the hackathon because they were startups who were participating in several hackathons continuously in a hope of raising the seed funds and honestly, there was no way it could be verified whether that a particular team had done all the work in the 36 hours or if they had a readymade project beforehand because everything was happening remotely.
Finally, the results came in and our happiness knew no bounds when we read “52 FinHelp” in the list (52 was our team no.), after all we were among the top 30 out of more than 15,000+ participants from all over the country.
Facing the jury for the final round
After getting selected in the top 30, the race for top 10 was on. The top 30 teams had to pitch their idea to the jury members and answer their questions. Some of the prominent jury members were: Dinesh Rao (Former president, Karnataka Pradesh Congress), Aditya Thackeray (Cabinet minister, government of Maharashtra), Dr. Ajay Garg (Sr. Director at Ministry of Electronics & IT India), Abhishek Singh (CEO of MyGov, CEO NeGD at Government of India), and M.K. Narayanan (Former Director Intelligence Bureau, National Security Advisor and Special Advisor to the Prime Minister and Governor of West Bengal) etc.
Since, I was the team lead, I had to answer the question as the representative of my team. I was asked a question by Mr. Sandeep Verma (ZS — Global Business Technology Practice Lead for Big Data). The question was “How does your app prevent any case of misuse?”
This question was very much expected because the app deals with huge finances, so I answered the question by explaining how our app uses OCR technology and custom-made algorithms to verify important documents and details uploaded by the user. You can hear my answer in the video below:
Although I and our team were happy with my answer but unfortunately our team couldn’t make it to the top 10 but I was still very satisfied by what we had achieved till date. Everyone had put in their maximum efforts and that was enough for us to be proud of.
Expected impact and outcome of the product
Possible future inclusions/improvements
- We plan to explore the implementation of our product in Europe since the concept of Open Banking there will make the execution of the application much easier.
- We also plan to partner with auditors in order to make the data verification process more stringent and to maximize the trust factor of our product for which we are already in talks.
- Apart from the aspect of improvement, we will make the platform market-sustainable during the non-crisis days also by modifying the platform so that it can be used to invite firms to invest in businesses suffering due to non-availability of capital.
- As far as expansion is concerned, an idea of tax reductions involving staff costs compensations and general subsidies is on the table.
Learnings
- There are always instances in every organization where one does not have enough time but still needs to accomplish the task. The biggest takeaway for me during this hackathon was how to work under limited conditions. Ideating, designing and developing a fully working mobile application within 48 hours (even less) was a bitter-sweet experience which helped me grow as a designer overall.
- I got to interact with so many successful and amazing personalities from different fields from Spain, France, USA, UK , Australia and Estonia etc. Getting to learn directly from CEOs and founders of big organizations was one thing I will forever be grateful for.
- Before this, I had no experience of working remotely on such a large project. The constant need of frequent team discussions enabled me to learn how to manage projects remotely in an efficient manner.
Thanks to these people without whose help, we wouldn’t have been able to make it through :
Joao Rei (Host and mentor, Garage48), Mari Hanikat (CEO, Garage48), Kadri Kõivik (Project Manager, Garage48), Uve Poom (CEO, SupplierPlus) Florent Bardy (Lead, AREA42), Dechen Dolker (AVP, Star India), Andrew Quinn (CEO, AVA), and Siim Lepisk (Head of digital strategy, SEB)
Special thanks to Joao and Mari for organizing the hackathon and making sure everything flowed smoothly.
Special thanks to Kadri for being available 24/7 for any doubts and clarifications.
Special thanks to Uve and Florent for being such amazing mentors and guides throughout the hackathon.
Do let me know your views on this. You can reach out to me on my email, LinkedIn or on Twitter . You can also checkout my portfolio for more interesting case studies like this :)
