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Blueprint Games

Your Task

Today, you will assume the role of a Blueprint developer. You and your team will work together to define project goals, deliverables, and features for a nonprofit, assuming you have ten weeks to implement your plan.

Don't worry — you won’t be writing any code today. Instead, your team will focus on understanding and discussing product needs, outlining key features, planning high-level user flows, and modeling your initial database needs.

✨ If you don't understand every part of the prompt, that's okay. Ask your team members (and E-Board) for help! This exercise is as much about your ability to collaborate as it is about your ability to work towards completing the task.

🥁 Drumroll… Introducing the nonprofit you’ll be working with today…

Invisible Hands

Invisible Hands is a community-based group of over 10,000 organizers and volunteers who deliver groceries, prescriptions, and other necessities to those at high risk during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the elderly, immunocompromised, sick, and disabled. Volunteers practice all safe distancing guidelines to keep ourselves and our communities safe, but become friends with the people to whom we deliver, socially engaging while physically distancing.

Given the urgency of the pandemic, the non-profit started to launch their service using the following model:

  • Elderly individuals may submit delivery requests through Invisible Hands' online portal.
  • The administrative team receives these requests from the portal and relays open deliveries to volunteers (runners) via Slack.
  • Runners who are available will indicate that they are available for a given delivery.
  • The administrative team sends the runner more detailed information about the items, then marks the delivery as "In Progress" on the online portal. 
  • When the runner completes the delivery, the administrative team sends a "Complete" notification on the online portal.

As you can see, processing deliveries is quite inefficient. To relay open deliveries to runners, data is passed through two platforms (online portal, Slack), and assigning deliveries is a manual matching performed by the administrative team. 

The Goal

✨ Your challenge is to create a platform that enables a streamlined process of connecting delivery requests to volunteers. Consider the following questions:

  • How can we leverage technology to eliminate (unnecessary) intermediaries?
  • How can the data flow be more efficient?

The Users

  • Elderly & Immunocompromised Individuals
  • Volunteers (Runners)
  • Administrative Team

Getting started

When Blueprint partners with a nonprofit, they describe the challenge they’re facing, and we’re free to decide how to tackle it. Today, you’re in Blueprint’s place. How you choose to approach this prompt is entirely up to you and your team. Just make sure you can provide solid justifications for your decisions. There’s no right answer—everything has tradeoffs.

Here are some questions to get you started.

  • What kind of system do you think would fit best? Is it an app, a website? Or is it something else entirely?
  • Consider the profile of a typical user. Are there any considerations that should be made when designing a new system for said user? How might these considerations affect the final deliverable?
  • What features would be most valuable to the nonprofit and its end-users?
  • How can you make sure it's feasible for your team to complete within the ten weeks?
  • What should you focus on? What might you have to sacrifice?

When you’re ready to get started, duplicate this Google Doc and share it with your team members. The doc contains a few tips on how to take notes.

Deliverables

🌟 You will not be asked to present your final deliverables. We are more interested in seeing how you go about understanding and breaking down the problem than any polished final result.

Document any thoughts, drawings, or features as you work! At the end, you will submit everything your team has come up with.

That said, we aren't looking to see a beautiful polished design doc — we're most interested in your process, so feel free to include in-progress work and notes, and don't fret about the formatting.

Your team will submit the design doc (created earlier) which can include any artifacts you create or use throughout this process. This can include:

  • brainstorming notes
  • sketches
  • screenshots or links to design mockups
  • links to online sources

Tips

Helpful process to go about designing apps

  1. What features are most important?
  2. What information/data you need to build those features?
  3. How should this information/data be represented, and how much of that information is shown to users?
  4. What is the flow each user takes in order to access and manipulate this information?
  5. What would the screens look like to each of the users?

Understanding the end user

  • How can we build in a way that creates an app that is accessible, simple to use, and easy to understand?

Good luck! 🙆

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