3 Things I Learned From My First Hackathon
By: Mae Nakajima
Tags: UX Design, Hackathons, UX, Design, Ux Learning

3 Things I Learned From My First Hackathon

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

This past weekend, I participated in my very first hackathon with UX Result, an online, fully remote event, with three other designers. Among the different challenges, we chose the UXPressia challenge, which involved re-designing the onboarding flow to improve their chatbot experience. I’m extremely fortunate and proud to have worked alongside hardworking, proactive and fun individuals and being awarded as runner ups for the 48-hour chatbot re-design challenge. Here are some takeaways I’ve learned from this experience that might be helpful for your next hackathon!

Identifying your Team’s Superpower

I think every one of us has had at least one experience working with someone difficult in their lives whether that was for school projects or in the workplace (and we know how unproductive that can be). One thing I considered when teaming up with someone was identifying their motivations and really getting to know them beforehand. When working on something time-sensitive as a hackathon project, I find it important to leverage each member’s superpower and trust each other enough to know that we got each other’s back. I teamed up with 3 amazing designers from the same DesignLab bootcamp and was able to learn more about their experiences and approach to design prior to the hackathon. Although we have never interacted nor worked together on anything before this, I was constantly thinking about how to play on our individual strengths and how I can adapt to the overall workstyle of the team.

Getting to know each other over zoom the night before design challenges are revealed.

Preparing for Collaboration

The key to being prepared is to consider other options so if plan A doesn’t pan out, there are other plans to fall back to so we can submit our work successfully. Since this was going to be a team project, collaboration spaces needed to be set up so I got started. I’m not going to lie — initially, I tried desperately to look for notion templates (or any template for that matter) to prepare for the hackathon. But I soon realized that as there is no one cookie-cutter approach to design, there was no perfect layout that will guarantee our success. For our team, a Notion space was created to easily access all the necessary things such as event links, Figma space, deliverables and our final presentation. I don’t think it matters what tools or platforms you use, but more so to consider what works best for your team.

Our team used Figma to identify areas that can be improved from the current on-boarding flow.

Working on the Design Challenge

Finally, the design challenges were revealed and it was time to get working. Our team hopped on zoom to get aligned with our game plan, divided up tasks and executed them within a set timeframe in breakout rooms. While we each worked on specific tasks, we were all very much involved with each step of the process, giving feedback and over-communicating in order to stay on the same page. We also secured some participants ahead of time for any usability tests or user interviews.

By the second day, our team was losing steam working late from the night before so we made sure to schedule breaks throughout the day in between deliverables. Taking breaks is super important as it reduces stress and maintains the team’s performance throughout the day.

As the deadline approached, our team prioritized tasks necessary for our final presentation. While we weren’t able to build out a working prototype, our team decided a different approach by showing key screens with the breakdown of our solutions. The lesson here is that setbacks can often happen and that it’s important not to panic. I was proud of my team for calmly assessing the situation to focus on our next move. Because we were building out our presentation slides as we were completing each deliverable from the start of the project, we were able to save some time for the final video presentation and successfully submit it with no issues.

Going over our slide deck before recording the the final presentation.

Final Thoughts

My first hackathon experience was a great blast. Our team of first-time hackers managed to place second in a design challenge and that itself gave us the confidence that we’re doing something right. It was also a lot of fun looking through other teams projects and learning a lot from them as well. Through this experience, I’ve gained a collaborative product that I could be proud of that I made with my amazing colleagues along with the knowledge that will serve me both personally and in my design career. I’m so glad that I participated in this hackathon and encourage others to join with a good team.

At the end of the day, I feel that anyone who participated in a hackathon with the intention to learn and have fun are already winners because everyone levels up in their own way.

Cheers to great learning experiences and many more to come!