MVB Hackathon Enters its Second Round

After the massive success of the first MVB Hackathon last year, the next round was held in November 2024.

Like last year, this year's collaborative event was organized by Christian, the head of IT Development. Convinced by the format, he once again challenged his team to leave their day-to-day work behind for a day and try something new. The aim was to dedicate themselves to a specific task and leave their comfort zone. In new team constellations, colleagues were able to express themselves creatively and think about approaches, solutions and codes.

Our trainee Lorina was on site at the Haus des Buches this year and took a closer look.

At 8:30 am, we heard the task for the first time: „Customer Service From Hell“. Each team had to build a user interface where you could contact the customer service via chatbot - and make this as difficult and complicated as possible. In addition, all inquiries to the chatbot were to be answered as complex and useless as possible.

The three teams “Helpdesk Heroes”, “Support Squad” and “Customer Care Crew” had until around 7 pm to do this. After a joint dinner, Christian, Head of the department, first tried to fight his way to the chatbot on his own and without help, which caused quite a few laughs. Afterwards, each team had the option of presenting undiscovered features.

The way hacking is portrayed in movies - with green-glowing sequences of numbers à la Matrix that run across the screen at infinite speed - is of course not the case at all. In real life, everything runs much more calmly. For someone like me, i.e. someone without programming skills, it almost looks as if nothing is happening at all. I did look over shoulders from time to time during the day and heard the occasional suspicious noise (more on this later: no spoilers!), but of course there was barely anything to see until the presentation in the evening.

That's why I asked the professionals what exactly happened in the more than 10 hours between the briefing and the presentation.

The task sounded very funny, but how do you even go about developing a chatbot from hell?

Uwe (Customer Care Crew): First of all, our team brainstormed about what kind of nastiness and annoyances you can impose on the user. Then we split into two groups. One focused exclusively on building the most unpleasant web interface possible to make the path to the chatbot as rocky as possible. The other group was responsible for connecting ChatGPT as a chatbot, which was a mandatory part of the task. And then it had to be trained in such a way that no more helpful answers could be elicited from it.

Max (Helpdesk Heroes): Not that much different than the development of other features. First of all, we thought about how the chatbot should work in the end and created a few sketches to go with it - oldschool with Paint. Once we had the prototype in writing and form, we selected the appropriate technologies and got started. During development, we decided on any detailed questions that arose as a team and continuously added new features to the existing prototype until the deadline.

Mel (Support Squad): Every one of us already had some ideas in mind after the task was set, so we first discussed them in our team. After that, it quickly became clear which technologies we wanted to use for the project. While some of us worked on optimizing the chatbot, the others built the website. The coordination and distribution of tasks was quite straightforward, as we worked really well together as a team.

From chatbots in dialects to hidden puzzles and annoying noises, everything was included. How did you come up with the ideas?

Uwe (Customer Care Crew): Well, we all have our own experiences with customer services and websites. What all our solutions had in common, for example, was that you had to read through long and incomprehensible terms and conditions, and they all had captchas built in, where you had to painstakingly prove that you were a human and not a bot. Other elements that spoiled the fun were time pressure, being thrown back again and again and having to repeat everything, distracting noises and fidgeting, misleading or hidden instructions, meaningless information - who hasn't suffered from that?

Max (Helpdesk Heroes): Unfortunately, all of us have had to experience such bots and websites. As a basis, we collected “worst-of” features and thought about how we could combine them in the most annoying way. We then expanded the basis with ideas that largely contradict what we as developers actually want to represent: Designing intuitive web interfaces. So we asked ourselves: “What is the opposite of what we usually want to do?”

Mel (Support Squad): As a team, we first discussed what we had already experienced with chatbots and unfindable information and then used this to find the initial inspiration. While researching possible implementations, we came up with even more ideas. We even consulted ChatGPT, which helped us to structure the site.

It was obvious that you had fun with the task. But what was the biggest challenge?

Uwe (Customer Care Crew): On the one hand, the technical merging of the results of our two sub-teams, on the other hand the right dosage of meanness. For example, our approach made accessing the chat function so tricky that the jury barely got to try out our chatbot, which has such nice features as answering in a pentameter iamb, in the style of Goethe or in a random foreign language.

Max (Helpdesk Heroes): The biggest challenge was selecting the features that we wanted to implement in the end. We knew from the last hackathon that we would have to start with just a few features and then gradually expand the chatbot because there wasn't enough time last year. We wanted to do that more effectively this year. To do this, we had to remove some features at the beginning.

Mel (Support Squad): It was definitely a challenge to pick out the ideas that could be implemented within the given time frame. Perhaps the biggest challenge was configuring the chatbot in such a way that it was annoying and persistent, but you could still somehow reach the goal.

To summarize: the teams had no shortage of ideas and with more time they would probably have come up with even nastier requirements. But even as it was, there were all kinds of tricks. A few of my personal highlights were:

• loud techno music when you were put on hold
• meowing with every click
• a quiz on the terms and conditions
• a help icon that "runs away" from the cursor
• a waiting room window from which you are immediately thrown out again when you leave it with the mouse pointer

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