Lady In The Tube

Context & Challenge

Wellframe is a healthcare management company that links users of its mobile app with care managers to aid with treatment plans, medication reminders, daily wellness, and more. In January 2022, Wellframe held its first ever company-wide hackathon!

The theme of the hackathon was "My Ideal Wellframe" -- where we were tasked to develop a new feature for any part of the organization, whether it be user facing changes, dashboard-wide, or data analytics. My team, the mobile team with primarily iOS devs, took on the challenge of making the app more "techy" and implementing Siri, and we named our team "LITT" after a podcast had referenced Siri as the "Lady in the Tube" to avoid setting her off; a funny obstacle my team and I ran into plenty during the hackathon.

Process & Approach

In my team of five with me being one of the two developers, we decided to tackle one of the most used features of the app: reminders. Reminders works by prefilling all of the assumed details of the reminder and allowing the user to change them in the edit screen (shown below).

Over the course of three working days, my team was able to develop a working implementation of Siri-created reminders! We utilized Siri Intents and made sure its behavior mimicked that of the prefilling nature. After my mentor helped link Siri Intents with our app, I completed the rest of the logic behind processing a request, cleaning it as necessary, and filling out a reminder without the edit stage.

Results

By the end of the third day, we presented our work to the senior leadership team, including the CEO, CTO, Head of Engineering, and more. I led the live demo displaying the ability to create vague monthly reminders to very specific daily reminders, and our project ended up winning Best Presentation and Most Out of the Box with promises it will likely be put on the project development road map!

Reflection

This was the first hackathon I had completed in a developer role as well as the first hackathon I had completed with coworkers and peers who were much more senior than me. It was insightful working with them in a creative context and seeing what ideas and expertise they were able to bring and help materialize over the course of 3 days. It was also fascinating to see from a business point of view the strengths of different ideas, beyond something being cool for a hackathon!