The Problem
In April of 2019, I attended the eMerge Americas Hackathon. I applied for it online and 2 days before the hackathon day I was given my group. I partnered with a UX designer friend of mine, and we were added to a group with other 2 developers.
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The hackathon had a pretty broad theme and that gave us the freedom to explore several areas of improvement in Miami, but also because of that, we had to spend more time discussing the possibilities and coming up with a solution.
HACKATHON
CONNECTING MIAMI TO THE WORLD
Tourism is the #1 Industry in Miami and only in 2017, there were 16 million visitors to Miami spending $26 billion.
As we all were either immigrants or knew -a lot of- people that came from different countries and still couldn't talk fluently in English, we quickly came to an agreement that we would solve language barriers.
The Research
An important aspect of hackathons is time. This one specifically was supposed to last 12 hours (8 AM to 8 PM), but we actually had to have our projects done for presentation at 6 PM, giving us only 10 hours to do it.
With that in mind, we didn't have much time to interviews so we gathered data and demographics from the city's tourism reports and had informal talks with close friends about their language struggles.
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The research below shows the top 10 countries people come from when visiting Miami, only there you can see 5 different languages.
The first country with the most visitors is Canada, english and french speakers. Also, Miami is well known for having a big number of Spanish speakers with residents that come from the South and Central America.
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We created two user personas for this project. The tour guide, Javier, a Cuban artist that only feels comfortable giving tours in his native language, spanish. The Canadian family, the Smiths, that want to experience what is like to be a local without any of the risk-taking or uncertainty.
We also did a quick research on the competition out there, which provided us with many inspirations and ideas. Also showed us deficient areas that we could improve.
The Solution
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USER SCENARIO
The Smiths are a Canadian family of 4. They've decided to travel to Miami on vacation and are staying in a hotel in Miami Beach. Despite loving the beach and the weather they want to do cultural activities to enrich their kids' education and provide a distracting and different family activity. They found some amazing local activities that give a tour around historic and art spots in Miami, but unfortunately the ones they liked the most are presented by Spanish-speaking locals.
With Loqal, they were able to find a local experience hosted by Javier, a Cuban artist that provides a tour around Havana, teaching Cuban art as well as a workshop where the kids can have the experience themselves.
The Smiths and Javier can talk freely in any language, and the algorithm will recognize it and translate it to each user set-up language.
After Mr. Smith purchases the tour for 4 people, a group chat will be created and he can then add up to 3 people in there. During the tour, all the audios that Javier sends to the group chat are translated in real-time to the guests' language.
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Defining the Visuals
For the visuals, we wanted to give it Miami colors sue to honor the event organizers, which are based in Miami. We looked into many different aspects of the Miami culture and pictures that portray the city's main landscape. We decided to use pastel colors, and include the turquoise representing the beautiful sea color, and the orange for the summer vibe. ​
​We are Loqal
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An open-source application that drives connection across language barriers.
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Real-time chat translation happens between the local guide and the tourists. As well as an audio translation during the tour.
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No common language is required. Empowering any local to become a guide, and visitors to explore neighborhoods they otherwise would not.
Next Steps
Based on some market research, some of the ideas we had as a group for this app are the following.​
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Live audio translate.
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Group talks and international conferences.
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Map feature highlighting different neighborhoods, to address experiences available in that area, as well as the crime rate in that area.
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With more time, I would have loved to test the actual needs of users when it comes to language barriers and adapt the solution based on their feedback.
Thanks!
