When The Designers Reunited
First Published on May 16, 2016
After successfully creating a community of designers in the Mumbbbai Dribbble meetup last year, we knew that it was time to reunite them, and add more members to our tribe. This year, we decided to go with the theme — Product Design. About 60 designers assembled at the Crowdfire HQ on Saturday, 7th May to celebrate the magic they create and the life they bring into great products with their beautiful designs. And you know what happens when so many creative minds gather — lots of networking, design talks, games, and a gala time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
People started pouring in from 11 am onwards and they were greeted by one of us at the registration desk. After entering their names in the guest list, we would add a random colour strip to their name tags. If someone would ask, “What is this for?”, “You’ll know soon” would be the cryptic response.
After a bit of hi’s and hello’s, everyone gathered in the cafeteria for an introduction with a twist. Everyone had to introduce themselves by using a random word. For instance, there were introductions like, “Larissa D’sa — Pineapple”, “Siddharth Menon — Buddha”, “Vinit Nair — Neo”, etc.
After that, we divided everyone present into four teams based on the colour strip on their name tags. And then began the epic game of dumb charade where one person from every team had to enact the product names to their respective team while others would just try to confuse them. People enacting product names like Airbnb, Buzzfeed, IMDb, Slack, Reddit, etc. pretty much had all of us in splits.
There also were asynchronous games running in different parts of the office to help people collaborate better. When we say “Dribbble meetup”, it’s hard to not think about analog playoff, and all of these games revolved around this concept.
Product designers have this uncanny knack of simplifying things around them and creating the best user experience. We decided to add a playful tinge to it and challenged them to team up and make a functional iPhone stand out of legos by using the least number of bricks. Once done, they had to submit their creation along with their names and the number of bricks they used at one of our desks. The stand with the most number of hearts would win, of course. Isn’t that how analog playoff works?
People also got an opportunity to step into the shoes of Jony Ive for a day and design the best onboarding flow for Apple Music. The idea was to onboard the users effectively and offer faster gratification. It was fun watching teams sitting together and brainstorming to crack the problem.
One design that caught plenty of attention as well as hearts had adopted an interesting approach towards onboarding new users, where: A user could begin with shazaming a song that they wanted to play. While the music played, the app (Apple Music) would recommend similar kind of music and allow the user to add more music. We believed that it was pretty smart because this way, Apple Music quickly does what it’s expected to — play the music that the user loves.
Mumbbbai is not just a name — it’s a community — and we wanted all the members present to feel part of it. We invited the designers to design the “Mumbbbai” logo and the best one (with the most number of hearts) would be used for the meetup in 2017. Win-win, no?
There was also a Photo Booth with props where people came, made crazy poses, and left with memories.
Good music, pizza and drinks (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) were cherries on the cake. Meanwhile, people were sharing the feels by using the unique hashtag #mumbbbai in their tweets.
We made sure to give our lovely guests a parting gift (with Crowdfire and Dribbble goodies) or giveaway as you would call it. A Swag Box which read ‘Always be burning’.
It’s barely been a week and the community is already filled with ideas about what we can do in the next year’s meetup!
If you were present at Mumbbbai and had fun, please share your thoughts in the comments. If you enjoyed reading the post, do recommend and share. :)
