Baba Martin

Brief
Oracle & Orange organized a 24-hours hackathon as they have
started a revolution on designing the future of messaging & bots.

Pitching an individual’s idea for potential chatbots that could be

used in a specific pool of subjects.

Problem
To design a service via a chatbot that enlightens users around the
question “What should I do with my life?”.

Solution
A life journey advisor chatbot that gives you support and guides you
when you need it.

Why?
Humans experience crisis moments along their life and when
seeking for help, friends and family appear to be busy. Who
supports you in those moments?

Tools Team 5 UX designers

• User personas
• User scenario
• Paper & pen
Ivana Andrea Kosta
• Chatbot persona
s
• Chatbot Prototyping

Mungo Me

Discover
Hackathon
I took part in “HackUX: Bots” Hackathon organized by Oracle&Orange
in April 2018.

Our chatbot project was judged in terms of:

• Originality of service concept
• Benefits of service
• Best UX in demo

“What should I do with my life?”

Among the pitched ideas, I

decided to join Mungo’s idea
which was defined by

“What should I do with my

life?”

which consisted on

creating a chatbot with the

ability to guide users in crucial
moments of their life.

DAY 1
Let’s go pubing and brainstorm
The same evening of the Hackathon kick-off, we headed to the pub to
brainstorm on questions that the chatbot should/could ask to users.

We came up with a total of 38 questions which were written in post-it

notes and sticked nicely to the pub’s wall (until they politely asked us
to remove them :D).

The questions covered a broad range of topics.

“How are you feeling “Do you like to be

today?” challenged?”

“Do you prefer routine “What do you want to

or variety” talk about today?”

Kostas sticking a new post-it note during our brainstorm.

Exercise takeaways
• Group discussion where opinions from each team member were
captured and shared in loud voice.

• Connecting and building ideas together to create a robust

research for the bot, the service we focused on.

• Building a common pool of questions as project start = reasearch

is key!
less than 24 hours to deadline!

DAY 2

Affinity maps
As we arrived Andrea and I started to sort the existing data gathered
during previous’ day brainstorm using affinity diagrams.

Questions were organized based on their relation to cluster

categories.

DEMO INFO

PERSONALITY

PREFERENCES

ATTITUDES

Andrea and I communicated and presented our findings to the rest of

the team.

Andrea explaining clusters.

Time constraints
Due to the limited hackathon working time, we made time-decisions
which sacrificed some steps in the UX process.

In other scenario, we would validate initial findings with real users to

get feedback from them via interviews/surveys.

This would have been beneficial in terms of user testing,

contextualizing data and validate team assumptions.

Define
Persona
Mungo and Kostas leaded the work on creating Baba Martin target
user persona archetype.

Here Fiona. And Mungo.

Scenario
I leaded the creation and definition of a user scenario for Fiona.

She is going to a job fair and

while in there, she discovers a
new and exciting job role she
never heard of -> coder.

This role combines her

professional and non professional
skills.

She is in crisis;

needs support and

decides to consult Baba Martin!

After a quick talk, she feels

enlightened and has few
resources provided by Baba
Martin.

Bot persona
We named our chatbot Baba Martin which subtly connects the bot
service & its benefits.

BABA MARTIN

Baba means father in the Middle Martin for Martin Luther King,
East and South Asia area. one of the most visible
spokesperson and leader of our
history.

A father is a wise and trustable Martin was chosen to represent a

figure. source of inspiration and
understanding.

Baba Martin is visually represented as an elephant; symbol of wisdom

and intelligence. Well-developed logo idea which inspired us through
the whole project.

Design

Bot personality
As a life journey advisor service, Baba Martin personality is knit
together to its persona and its content.

Baba Martin is somebody

who

Is friendly and positive

Cares about you

Motivates you

Challenges you

Bot Content & Style

As Oracle and Orange pointed out: content is KING in chatbots.

Prior to content development and writting, we discussed and agreed

the following content rules:

• Keep it simple: no reason to complicate how Baba Martin

communicates

• Max two sentences per message

• No more than two messages without interaction: keep the user

engaged

• Avoid text-speak: use correct grammar and capitalisation

• Use emojis: keep the right level of informality chat

Deliver
A persona, scenario and chatbot were created. We had 1.5 hours left to
work in Baba Martin prototype using Botsociety.

Botsociety was a robust platform with an intuitive interface; we

created the bot conversation based on our research and design
phases.

Bot scenario & Prototype

After attending a job fair,

Fiona starts a conversation with Baba

Martin where they talk about

the job fair,

her feelings and

what she can do next.

Baba Martin provides her with resources

to support his guidance on next steps
she could go for on her professional
career.

Prototype

Outcome
We created a very good service in 24 hours. Baba Martin was
coherent and catching; the chatbot addressed a good % of our
research questions and solved the project problem.

In the given 3-min slot for presentations, we exposed a cohesive

product which included: user persona, scenario and bot.

Takeaway 1

We weren’t sharp presenting the bot prototype; This estresses the

idea of allowing enough time to rehearse the service presentation.

Takeaway 2

Team dynamics: very receptive and open-minded team that allowed

a healthy and productive workflow for almost 24 hours!!

Takeaway 3

I am addicted to hackathons: the combination between time

constraints, working in an agile enviro and with close-knit people
from different background excites me.

Baba Martin fantastic team (from left to right): Kostas, Mungo, Andrea, Ivana
and me.