During my 10-month stint in Los Angeles, I volunteered with Hack for LA and joined the Food Oasis team. Our goal was to build a tool for social workers that aided people living in neighborhoods with limited access to nutrition (food deserts).

After receiving in depth feedback from government employees, food justice advocates, and welfare recipients, we set out to redesign our core product.

We needed to launch of our redesign before an interview with CNN Money and only had two weeks to complete our redesign. Our first challenge was collectively deciding on which features to implement first based on our clients’ needs and our time constraints.

I helped facilitate a group exercise meant to narrow our project’s scope. I handed out sticky notes for each team member to write their top feature on, and had them place it on a timeline that specified whether we should  build it now or in two months. With everyone’s ideas on the board, I lead a guided discussion on which features should be postponed or prioritized until the supermajority of the room was satisfied with our schedule.
 

 

Now that our features were decided, I met with a team of talented volunteer designers to run a design sprint.

We decided on a general direction for the user interface and experience based on services like Yelp and Google Maps and set out drafting our own for Food Oasis. We hung up our individual sketches and voted on which elements appealed to us most before working together on a finalized interface:

Not only did we complete our redesign on time, but Los Angeles City Controller Ron Galperin presented Hack for LA with an Award of Recognition for their efforts in developing civic technology, with Food Oasis LA as its flagship team.