That Aha! Moment
Considered by some to be the best day of the year, Mode’s hack day is a 24 hour period of intense creativity and execution. It’s an event that happens just twice a year where employees are encouraged to step out of their day-to-day responsibilities and challenge themselves to create or do something that they normally wouldn’t.
This isn’t your typical hackathon. Hack day projects at Mode don’t need to be relevant to the company’s quarterly goals, or even related to the product. Some of the best hacks have simply made life at Mode better, through new office decor, fresh T-shirts, or clever parody videos. The rules are loosely defined and the possibilities are endless.
A few years back, Mode worked on a different floor in our building at 208 Utah Street. On this floor was a mural that visualized the weekly usage of our product by customers, broken out by cohort. I was so inspired by the idea of this data-viz-turned-wall-art that I wanted to create one in our new space.
I could picture exactly how I wanted it to look — bold and striking, with clean edges and sharp lines. And I had no hesitation picking out wall paint colors at the local Sherwin-Williams. But when it came to what this would actually be visualizing, what the mural meant? That was another story.
At Mode, the design team’s access to data scientists is one of our greatest blessings. We’re an endless fountain of questions when it comes to our users and their behavior, and we’re fortunate to be able to use our product — or enlist the help of those who know how to use it better than us — to answer those questions.
So that’s what I did. After enlisting the help of Josee on our People team to join the hack, we reached out to Joel on the Data Science team to help us come up with a visualization that was not only visually compelling, but told a really interesting story.
After a few iterations, he settled on a heatmap which met this criteria, and very importantly, would actually be something we could paint on the wall without compromising the accuracy of the data (straight lines FTW!).
The heatmap is composed of 168 cells, each representing an hour of the week. Seven columns represent the days of the week, Sunday at far left and Saturday at far right. Twenty-four rows represent the hours of the day, with 12:00am at the top and 11:00pm at the base. The brightness of each cell represents the relative number of Mode users who, in that hour, shared something they built in Mode for the very first time.
I tested out several color options before settling on a dark blue to lime green gradient color scheme, then mapped the relative density of each cell on the heatmap to a color.
The first step in translating the chart onto the wall was to create the grid. This involved a measuring tape, a pencil, a yard stick, and a lot — I mean a lot — of blue painter’s tape.
The color mixing came next, which posed quite a challenge. We had to create 20 custom colors for each variation of the cell colors by very carefully mixing the blue and green paint together. This involved a lot of squinting into red solo cups full of paint and a lot of requesting second opinions (does green #7 look 5% darker to you than green #8?).
Painting the mural was painstaking but extremely satisfying. Each cell took several coats of paint which made progress slow, because we had to wait for the paint to dry before putting tape against the edges of adjacent cells. But nothing quite beats the feeling of pulling off a strip of painter’s tape and seeing that nice, clean, straight line.
No art is complete without an artist’s statement, of course. We couldn’t help being a little tongue in cheek when writing our’s…
It may seem like a simple wall decoration, but the mural really was a great example of what you can create when you tap into the skills of people across different teams. We never would have been able to come up with such a compelling visualization without the help of the data science team, and the mural never would have come to life without all the helping hands along the way.
Today the piece serves as a focal point when visitors step out of the elevator at Mode headquarters and reminds us of what we can accomplish when we don’t work alone!
