Hackathon Case Study: UX/UI Design

KineMoe.mk — website redesign for a streaming platform
This project was a hackathon hosted by Brainster Academy

*This is a student group project during my UX/UI design academy in Brainster Academy (team of 4 ux/ui design students)

Overview
The mission of “KineMoe” is to showcase the richness of Macedonian, Balkan, European and Mediterranean cultures and creativity through a diverse range of audiovisual content. It aims to provide a dedicated space for filmmakers, artists and creators to display their work to both national and worldwide audience. To achieve stakeholders mission and vision they had for their platform we used the Double diamond design thinking process.

Problem statement
I joined the hackathon because it offers a real-world application of the skills and theories I’ve been learning on the academy, providing invaluable hands-on experience. Engaging in such intensive, time-constrained challenges fosters creativity and problem-solving abilities, pushing me to think outside the box and develop innovative solutions under pressure. Completing the project successfully showcases me and my teammates dedication and ability to deliver results within tight deadlines.

The main project goals
- Desktop first
- enhance user engagement, gamification
- create a unique and culturally rich user interface, ethno-modern design patterns and colors
- incorporate interactive elements
- social features
- attract more costumers

Users and audience
From analyzing the creative project brief and the interview we had with the stakeholders to gather even more insight about their goal for KineMoe.mk, we found out that the target audience are people that moved away from their country and want to stay in touch with their roots and culture and also sharing them with their children.

Roles and responsibilities
This was a 48 hour hackathon by our academy, so we were working as a team of 5 junior ux/ui designers.
Working with a team can be challenging, especially if team members have different backgrounds, skills, or communication styles, but with good communication and good time management nothing is impossible. So we made a plan and share our tasks and started working on the project.

Some of my responsibilities for this project were doing research, obtaining and assessing user requirements while discussing the gathered information with my teammates, conducting an interview with the stakeholder, working on the competitive analysis, the sitemap, the brand identity prism and visualizing design concepts with user flows and sitemaps that were melted into low fidelity and high fidelity wireframes later on.

Scope and constrains
Hackathons are time-limited events. The pressure to develop a functional website within a tight timeframe can be intense and may lead to rushed decisions and reduces sleep. Also, an effective collaboration within the team and dividing tasks can be a pain point, especially when some of the team members had to go to work for an eight hour shift.

The working process — the design thinking process
At the discovery phase we conducted a stakeholder interview as crucial step in the first phase, so we gathered an additional layer of insight that helped us understand stakeholder’s visions and problems.
To set the foundation for the design and to fully understand the needs of the target audience we’ve created a primary and secondary user personas. My responsibility was to define the key features the website must have in order to become the leading hub for entertainment and cultural content, as one of the stakeholder visions.
An important step that we took in the design process was creating a user flow and then a sitemap to help us to visualize how users navigate through the website.
After all the research we designed the platform KineMoe.mk by designing a clean, minimalistic and simple website with traditional ethnic elements and patterns creating a unique and culturally rich user interface evoking curiosity, enjoyment and inspiration in users.

Overall impressions
The 48-hour hackathon was an incredible experience full of teamwork and enthusiasm from all the participants who loved pushing one another to achieve more. This project has taught me that anything is possible with effective communication, teamwork, and time management — despite the pressure to create a working website and, more significantly, to fulfill the needs and ambitions of the client in a short amount of time.