2020 UX Design Hackathon:
We are Team No.80, Rosie Way, Indhumathi Venkatachalam and Susan Hamilton.
10:47 PM (EST) December 5, Saturday night, the time that we submitted our final deliverables was only 13 minutes before we hit the deadline. What an excited and wonderful experience it was! I was glad to participate in this design challenge and worked with UX designers that coming from different backgrounds, different time zone, different design skillsets…and most importantly, we created solutions and tackled down the challenges together!
As a result, I’d like to share what we’ve accomplished and what I’ve learned during this design challenge.
The Challenge We Choose
Combining our interests and design skills, we decided to bundle up two challenges(kill two birds with one stone): the Leverage Challenge which is to build out the onboarding process for a smart collar solution for dog owners and the Adobe XD Challenge which is to use any Adobe products and 3D feature of Adobe XD in our solutions.
The Team We Have
Based on our experiences and expertise, we took ownerships in the roles as following:
Me: sketch, wireframe, interactive hi-fi prototype, branding, style guide
Indhumathi: competitor analysis, presentation design, video editing, illustration
Susan: user interview, persona, storyboard, user journey, copywriting
The Time We Executed Our Solution
Even though each of us is located in different places and timezone (I’m based in the SF Bay area, Indhu is in Seattle, Susan is in Mexico), we still managed to work together over the Zoom for around 16 hours in total!
The “3D” Strategy We Developed (No pun intended 😉)
Discover user & market insight: We collected the user experiences from dog owners on their ideas about the smart collar. Susan happened to have roommates who have two dogs. So it was lucky for us to have this convenience to do the user interview in advance. While synthesizing what we found from our competitor analysis, we also discussed about what are the possible technical limitations.
Define the MVP for our solution: While analyzing the brief from the organizer, Leverage, we also listed down all the FAQ information that other teams asked. It helped us focus on what are the essential features we should build under our rigid time constraints.
Develop the prototype: We had a great discussion and collaboration on this part! I translated our findings first to sketch. Then I developed it into a wireframe on Adobe XD. Meanwhile, Indhu developed the illustration according to the story that we want to develop from the Persona Susan created. Just when we thought we almost finished the challenge, we found out we haven’t incorporated the 3D feature of XD into our solutions yet, we quickly discussed how the 3D should be presented. Finally, I converted our discussions into the final design of the interactive prototype.
What We Accomplished
Here is our Bark, a Doggo app that is dedicated to providing the solutions for Doggo Owners that can help their Doggo live with them happily and safely!
№1 Onboarding Process
Storytelling the situation when Doggo escaped while Doggo Owner wasn’t aware as the onboarding process to inform with Doggo Owners what Bark can do for them.
№2 Connect with Bark via Bluetooth or GPS
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Apply Adobe XD 3D feature inside the pairing process between Bark and the phone into an animation to help Doggo Owners know how to pair up the smart collar, Bark.
№3 Set up Safe Area for Your Doggo
Let Doggo Owners set up safe area range and Doggo-top-to-go places so Doggo Owners can know where their Doggos might go
№4 Welcome to Bark’s Homepage
With an engaging and clear UI design to show Doggo Owners where their Doggo, Bo is.
Our Presentation
What Judges Said
“Your solution seem to take into considerations some of the basic apsects of onboarding a BLE and GPS enabled products which is a good thing, presentation could be better but did its job, however, i would like to remind that the list of Problems you presented are more Desires ather than actual problem statemens, usability was well thought through but did lack some considerations on the side of error handling and unknon issues if such might happen. Happy path is always easier to design then an unhappy one” From Judge 1
“Nice research process, the flow is pretty clear. It will be better if make the 3d assets more contextual.” From Judge 2
What I’ve Learned
This is the very first UX Design Hackathon that I attended in my life! I had so many valuable lessons, learnings, and doings. To sum up in three perspectives, it would be:
Teamwork wise: Before we grouped into Team No.80, we have never worked with or known each other. It was a great experience to learn how to quickly know each of our strengths and collaborate together to develop the solutions. The secret of our collaboration is that we all trust and communicate with each other as early and clearly as possible.
UX Design wise: I learn the importance of developing all the possible user flows for users, including the “happy and unhappy” paths. While we were discussing user flows for the prototype, I focused too much on what the best scenario will be but neglected the edge cases. This result also reflected in the review judges gave us. It’s a great reminder to me as a UX designer, I need to know users better, no matter it is the early stage users or veteran users.
Career wise: Joining this Design Hackathon is the most exciting event that I have ever attended as a UX designer! Because of this event, I got the chance to work with awesome UX designers across the states. I got great design critiques from well-experienced UX creative directors, managers, designers from this field. I had meaningful learning from other teams’ solutions. What’s more, researching the challenges from the partnering organizations also helped me learning a great diversity in the design field and get to see how and what is the latest technology is happening.
What I will Do Next
I will definitely join this Design Hackathon next year! It is so much fun! If you want to team up and work together for next year, welcome to drop me a line 👋🏼!
Special thanks to UX Result for organizing this event and encourage UX Designers in all stages of our careers to work together and create solutions. Especially for Vlad and Judges, you put all your time and heart out there for us and make us become better at designing. At the same time, really love and thanks for my dear teammates, Indhu and Susan, for our great collaboration! And most importantly, to my design mentor, Janet, who encourages me to participate in design competitions so I can discover this opportunity!
About this 2020 UX Design Hackathon
This UX Design Hackathon is held by UX Result. They are a UX Design community based in Washington D.C. They initiated this Hackathon to welcome designers all over the U.S. to collaborate together as a team and spend 24 hours (this year was held virtually) to develop and present the solutions to challenges that are designated by partnering organizations.
On the other hand, they also invite well-experienced UX designers, team leaders and managers from companies such as Twitter, Adobe, IBM, EY, AKQA, Home Depot, Capital One and many more to be the judges to review all the submissions and select the winners to receive the awards.
This year’s prize is range from USD 250 to USD 1000 and software design tool licenses as well.
