Hack For India - UX Hackathon to improve popular Government products

How it started

It all started as a tweet in January by Dr Malpani.

Giving voice to the frustrations we all must have felt at some point, when using a government services online, the tweet asked: Why can’t we have a competition to improve the UI and UX of these digital assets.

In this frustration, we saw hope: Hope that we as a collective of product and design folks can do better. All that was needed was an enabler and an incentive.

At UXHack we always love to host hackathons that create impact, especially on products that have a wide reach. And so it happened that we tied up with Malpani Ventures to host what we called Hack For India: a UX hackathon to improve government and government related product. We also joined hands with the folks at Creators of Products, as our community partner.

Our goal was simple: We weren’t expecting that the hackathon would end up changing these assets dramatically, overnight. But we wanted to be the enablers to that conversation and provide young designers a platform, to showcase their design skills.

What next: The products

Next up, we picked products that we felt would create the most impact and needed the most love, design wise. We wanted to mix up the list, so that we covered all aspects of design, and not just visual design.

The products we chose were:

• BHIM app
• LIC
• GST Portal homepage
• IT Returns portal

Each had a unique problem statement: ranging from a redesign exercise, to a broader rethink on user flows. We detailed out each of these problem statements, in a short QnA. You can watch it here

And the Jury is

We spent a decent amount of time to get the jury right. We wanted a mix of design leaders, people who have worked with the government and someone who’s also worked on products from scratch. And so our panelists were:

Ankit Agarwal, Interaction Designer, Google

Ankita works as a UX Researcher at the Google Pay India team. We were really looking forward to her insights on payment experiences, for the BHIM challenge

Amit Ranjan, Co-founder Slideshare, Digilocker Architect

Given Amit’s background working on Digilocker, we knew his perspective on how to navigate Govt departments and hierarchy, to get things done, would be a great addition.

Dr. Aniruddha Malpani

Mr Malpani represented the ‘voice of the people’ so to speak and also a voice of inspiration for participants, as it turned out, during the event

Participation and submissions

We were delighted with the tremendous response to the event, atleast from a participation perspective: at last count we crossed 250 registrations, which honestly was above our expectations. And given that we also had teams taking part the total count was even higher.

But most importantly, what mattered was the submissions and their quality

Demo Day aka D Day!

So finally, after all this we came to the demo day: honestly we were a bit nervous, as we've not had a Demo Day for a while now, with a panel. So ensuring the logistics work out fine, ensuring no 'no-shows' from participants and generally wanting to have an enjoyable event, was top of our mind. After a soft run at noon to check out that the live streaming, linking and sharing was working fine, we all set in at 4PM.

We shortlisted 3 teams for the BHIM and GST Portal challenges to present their designs and work to the jury panel

After the initial intros (and mandatory tech hiccup!) the event went off smoothly. The jury had some awesome insights and feedback for each of the participants, which we are sure will help them in future too. 

We started off with the BHIM challenge: Ruchira and Ayush were neck and neck after their presentations. So we were looking forward to what the judges felt. 

For GST portal, all three teams had great presentations, but clearly there was one that absolutely stood out (the zoom link let out a collective aha when it was presented). Who? Find out below

And the winner is..

It was a really close battle between Ruchira and Ayush for the BHIM challenge. How close? The winning margin was just 0.3pts! But eventually Ayush, thanks to his fantastic primary research and insights, was the winner, with Ruchira second and Uppala third.

The GST Portal on the other hand was all about Uppala: all the jury members were impressed with his redesign. Gunangi came 2nd with Harshita and teammate Shubham, 3rd

  Here's a preview of some of their work. You can also check out all submissions here: BHIM and GST Portal

BHIM:

Existing flow:

Improved screens:

GST:

And we've also uploaded the entire event on Youtube, just incase you want to see it all:

Final thoughts

All in all, it was a fabulous event, not just for us, but for the participants too. We collectively came away from the event with a lot more hope: that if we believe that change can happen, it will.

But that's counting our chickens before the eggs hatch, as the main work starts now.

This event, albeit with all its glory and learning, was but an experiment to see if we can get young minds motivated to think and act on problems that exist. Clearly, judging by the response and quality of submissions, that does seem to be the case. All it needs is a little push and enablement.

The part that matters now is, working with the specific government departments and people, to ensure some, if not all these ideas, translate into actual execution. It's easier said than done, we all know that, but atleast it's a first step and we are hopeful.

If someone from these government departments is reading this blog post, we'd be more than happy to share our findings and suggestions that came through this event for BHIM and GST Portal.

And we also hope this can act as a template for future such hackathons.

Thank you to Mr Malpani for the initiative and vision as also our awesome jury panel, Ankita & Amit. 
Also, thank you to our community partner, Creators of Products.

And once again, congratulations to all the winners!

Useful Links

• Event Page: https://uxhack.co/hackforchange/
• QnA: https://youtu.be/2JvY4iHsNNY
• Demo Day: https://youtu.be/mVwaOstxIQI

- Akshay & Nishith