It’s a hard slog for young designers

Finally winning a hackathon

As a design student, we’re seen as incomplete if we haven’t surrendered cumulative years of sleepless nights to hackathons. So we all do spend our spare pennies on train trips to burn the midnight oil in innovation factories with other ‘creatives' we don’t know and won’t likely meet again.

So I was elated to finally be on a winning team.

Why did we win?

I don’t think there’s a secret to it. All hackathons are different and are all curated with different agendas in mind.

But here are a few recurring themes for success…

Tell a story. Having IBM Design Thinking hammered into your brain helps. It’s not the only design methodology out there, so it’s worth reading around but there is no doubt a set of tools that get you thinking about your target user above all else will mark you apart in your pitch.

Make sure your world revolves around a design method you know back-to-front and upside-down.

Don’t shy away from team-mates that seem hard to convert. With any open competition, you’ll meet people with their own agenda, whether pushing use of their own product, or sceptics drafting a business plan before you’ve sussed your target user. You know your creative process so have the faith to stick by it, defend it, and sell it to the cynics. No one has more invested in success than your own team; if you can sell your concept to them, your judging panel will be lapping up your idea like a group of kittens.

Judges will lap up a pitch that you’ve picked and tested to pieces in your team

Low-fi is great. Take a look at the room. Is everyone prepping snazzy presentations to talk through? How about forget the animations and graphics in your deck and spend the time on a quick storyboard that can flesh out your thinking with a bit of personality? Maybe everyone is scripting a lengthy, wordy pitch? Instead, throw together a quick slide on your persona so the judges can see for themselves why your solution is the best for your target user? Feeling threatened by hi-fi mock-ups or front end prototypes? Put pen to paper and create an end to end experience that the judges can buy into. Be different and do the most you can with your time.

Try leaving your hi-fi designs for after you’ve won your hackathon

Dig deep. No hackathon is run for a problem that hasn’t been solved before. As such, your stakeholders will have an idea of what they want from you, however open-minded they claim to be. Asking them what already works for them, their competitors, the users they want to reach will tell you a lot. Once stakeholder expectations are on the table, you’ll be able to illustrate how your new ideas might be even better than what they’ve seen others do.

Whether or not they admit to it, stakeholders always have their own agendas. Be sure to explore them so that they’re out in the open.

What’s worked for you at Hackathons? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Chloe Poulter is an intern UX Designer at IBM based in Hursley. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.