5 things I learned from my first UX Hackathon
I’ll admit that I had no idea what was in store for the graduate residency weekend at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). The chance to meet some of my classmates in person in Baltimore was exciting and all I really knew was that we would be participating in a group activity.
Once on campus, I learned that we had 48 hours to research, strategize, design, and pitch a product to a panel of UX professionals who would judge us and announce a winner at the end of the weekend. It was the first time I participated in a hackathon and, spoiler alert, our team didn’t win. These are my learnings from a weekend of intense UX hacking.
1. Establish team working norms and set a strategy upfront
We were all pre-assigned into groups of five with predetermined roles. MICA made sure to split us up into groups from different cohorts, adding a layer of unfamiliarity into the mix. It was the first time I had met the members of my group and wished we had time to get to know each other before jumping into the chaos.
I was assigned the role of Project Manager which was a coincidence because I was a Project Management Consultant in my pre-UX life. We also learned what the prompt would be for the weekend.
Our Challenge:
Design a talent pool platform/service that leverages peer to peer connections to find the most qualified candidates for open roles.
Lesson: spend time learning about the team’s backgrounds, communication styles, and strengths.
We decided that our assigned roles were suited to our skills and settled on using Figma for our designs and collaboration. I created a FigJam board to collect all of the ideas that started flying around, a Slack channel to communicate, and a Google Drive folder to store our documents.
I also put the deliverables we were assigned against the timestamps of the schedule. This helped us gauge when we were falling behind.
The Design Thinking framework came in handy to figure out who we are solving for and what part of the complex problem we could tackle. This framework can be scaled to work in as little as 48 hours to a full design sprint.
We used role-playing to find problems with the current system of recruiting talent in the tech industry. Using our own experiences helped create as-is state journey maps to find opportunity areas. Finally, we were able to come up with a solution to research and develop further:
A mobile app that would allow technology professionals to refer other professionals to jobs outside of their company.
Lesson: Spending time to identify the users and their journeys upfront will help make sure everyone has the same vision during the design phase and will guide research activities.
2. Divide, conquer, and work in parallel
Nathan and Heidi decided to tackle research. Using our vision statement as a guide, we came up with key research goals together. The research team created a survey that yielded 40+ responses and secured 3 user interviews on short notice.
Our Figma wizard, Schawnery, started setting up our design file while George started sketching some ideas on paper.
Lesson: use an iterative process of working on solutions together on paper and translating them to Figma side by side
We were tracking well against our timestamps on our first day by splitting up. It was refreshing to be in person and able to collaborate by drawing together, gathering around a screen, and using an old-school chalkboard.
3. Use research to differentiate your product
By the start of day two, our research team came back with great qualitative and quantitative data. Heidi found some research about diversity and how it could adversely affect referral because people tend to refer those most like themselves.
We used the research to narrow down the solution journey for a persona we planned on highlighting. It also made us pivot our focus to include more features for diversity reciting.
Lesson: Since everyone had the same prompt we wanted to find a way to stand out. Use research to help differentiate the product by finding a niche to solve for that is backed up by research.
4. Take care of yourself and your team
On our last working day, we had the biggest piece of work left: the prototype and presentation. As the hours passed, we grew more tired from the lack of sleep and breaks. While we had facilitators from MICA come around to check on us and encourage us to take breaks, we worked through many of them.
Lesson: Make sure you build in time to take care of yourself or your work will get clouded by fatigue.
We were getting to the end of the day when we realized we still had a lot left to do, especially the presentation. We had to cut out some features that would not be shown in the prototype and instead shifted to developing the pitch. We had to leave presentation practice for the next day, as we were all drained. I can’t say I got the best sleep that night due to the excitement and nerves for what our final day would hold.
5. It‘s all about the pitch
When the hard work is done, it all comes down to a ten-minute presentation in front of a panel of judges who have no idea what happened behind the scenes. Our group ended up practicing our pitch in the waiting area until the last possible minute, using the last bit of time we had left.
While watching the other groups present, I was amazed that we all had different approaches and solutions for the same prompt and time. It was finally time for us to present.
We gave our pitch in the form of a story — following a persona we had created through the research, product development, and the final demo of our work.
We finished a demo of our prototype and answered questions from the panel. It seemed to all go by incredibly fast and soon we were sitting in the auditorium waiting for the winning pitch to be announced.
The winning team had impressed the judges with how their research translated into features that were clearly articulated in the 10-minute pitch.
I realized that the way we approached our pitch was more of a case study, rather than a sell on our product. I talked to one of the judges afterward to get more feedback. He confirmed that while our idea and design were great, he would have liked to see more of the product in the presentation.
We had been living and breathing the product for the past few days but the judges had to see it shine through in 10 minutes.
Lesson: Sell the product. Show off the work you did and not so much the process. Make sure to tie in research during your demo to back up your design decisions.
Overall, it was an intense weekend that tested our ability to apply what we’ve learned with a brand new team in only 48 hours. Even though we didn’t win, we learned that under pressure, we can produce a strong body of research, a solution to a real work problem, a cool working prototype.
Hackathons are a great way to put your hard and soft UX skills to the test — I recommend everyone try it once.
