A Case Study: Some Reflections on My First UX Design Hackathon
Taking a User Experience Immersive is one thing. Learning and then doing. Sounds simple right? But what about learning while doing? That’s exactly what my Covid-19 Hackaton was.
Learning and then showing that as a designer in training, I could handle the pressure of a 24 hour project with deliverables and end results that could possibly be used and built out in the future.
The project: Building a solution for a very pressing issue. How can we help small, local, businesses stay a float during the pandemic situation.
And go!
Where to begin? I had to think about the project overall, and where the merit was within the it. Showing a process is all well and good, but if you are designing something for someone who doesn’t want it, or even worse, designing something that is neither useful or practical, you’re in trouble.
My teammates and I had several hours of brainstorming ideas, bouncing pitches off of one another, and doing some mid level research before we even thought about sketching.
The solution: An application both mobile and web friendly that would help small businesses in and around DC stay connected to the community. A user would begin by identifying themselves as either a neighbor, someone looking to help, or a business, someone who needed help. Open DC was born.
After a lot of thinking, and a lot of hard work going through the entire design process as quickly as possible, my team and I decided that it would be easiest, and the best use of the short time that we had, to build two different user flows as prototypes using Balsamiq and go from there.
The result is pictured to the left. The 24 hours taught me several things.
It’s important when you’re in a time crunch, to not spend hours trying to make something perfect.
Go with your gut. If you have an idea, run with while still accepting feedback and going back to drawing board several times.
Nothing that you do has to be final, but it does have to work with the MVP project model. The product has to be something that you are proud enough to explain and justify to your peers.
Put effort into making something tangible. There’s all the time in the world to go back and revisit. And believe me, I will be doing that for weeks.
Look at the scope of the project in chucks that you are able to unpack, and dive into the design after you are sure that your user flows and sketches make sense for not you, but for the user you are designing for.
And finally, this might be the most important thing. It’s okay to be unsure of your findings and results, that’s the whole point. But don’t let that stop you from reaching the finish line.
To start, you have to begin.
I had more fun working on this project not just because there was a certain level of freedom within my created solutions, but because in 24 hours, I was able to come up with an idea, back it up with research, convert that idea into something visual, and then taking those visual elements and tell a story through a digital, clickable, full blown prototype.
I don’t know if I would have been able to do that two weeks ago. The sense of accomplishment is one thing, but designing something that could potentially be used in the real world, designing for good, that’s what made my experience and my overall thoughts that much more positive.
In other words, I’m ready for the next design challenge.
See the full results here:
