How I Survived My First UX Hackathon
By: Celine Fucci
Tags: UX Design, Hackathons, IoT, Prototyping, UI Design

Process

Without a doubt, we had to make some sacrifices when it came to which parts of the UX process we wanted to prioritize. We had no choice but to be scrappy and squeezed in the relevant phases we thought we needed to set ourselves up for success. For the most part, we followed the phases of design thinking and conducted mini sprints.

Empathize & Define

These two phases were really all about defining our problem statement and conducting user research. We focused on identifying who our users would be and aimed to understand their needs, motivations, and behaviors.

Analyzing the Market

The night before, each team member took some time to analyze direct and indirect competitors pertaining to our problem space. In the morning, we came prepared to quickly synthesize our findings and form a user point of view that we would address with our design.

Competitive Analysis

Gathering Data

We also sent out a survey to a few people to gather answers to relevant questions. Surprisingly, this helped out a lot.

User Research Questions

All in all, our research was rather limited due to the time constraints we were under. Looking back, of course we would have loved to spend more time on research. However, the data we did collect was enough to make informed design decisions for V1 of our solution.

Ideate

Ideation consumed a big chunk of our time. Since we had two UX-oriented team members and two UI-oriented ones, we split up and designed in pairs. The UX-focused members drew up an app map/user flow, while the UI-focused members brainstormed visual directions. This involved creating some moodboards and discussing color, typography, and illustrations.

App Map/User Flow

Following this, we thought sketching ideas was critical, so we used the 6–8–5 method to draw out key screens and flows. We had so many ideas (which was great)! Ultimately, sketching provided us with a solid foundation for moving onto wireframes.

6–8–5 Sketches

Prototype

Going off of our wireframes, we created high-fidelity screens and prototyped the user experience. This involved transforming our ideas into a physical form to experience, interact with, and test. This part of the process was the most difficult because there wasn’t a lot of time to spend on perfecting the visual design.

Test

After putting together a solid prototype, the sensible next step would have been to test it. Testing is integral to any design process and it guides product iteration. However, because my team and I underestimated how long it would take us to assemble our prototype, we didn’t get much testing in. The best we could do was test it amongst ourselves. Originally, we did plan to test with users but ran out of time (this is definitely something to be mindful of in our next hackathon).

Iterate

Lastly, I want to touch on the importance of iteration, because it’s fundamental to good design. Since this was a single-day hackathon, we didn’t have time to iterate on our proposed solution. However, we didn’t completely disregard iteration. Instead, we decided to talk about it in a “future recommendations” slide at the end of our presentation. This also allowed us to switch from working on the happy path to thinking about alternate and edge cases.