Hackathons
2022
In spring 2022, we held our first annual Hackathon for the engineering and product departments. For four days we would break into 6 teams to work on previously selected ideas, with the aim to present deliverables to the stakeholders/judges on the final day.
My team included:
1 Product Owner
1 UX Designer (me)
2 QA
3 Developers
My team’s chosen project was to develop a self-service chatbot.
After a brief, brainstorming and consensus-building session, we dug into our specialties. I gathered inspiration for the design from internet research, our staff designer’s illustrations, and an existing live-support chat feature within our product.
Because this chat was meant to support a user when they’re having a problem, I wanted to keep the chatbot’s language pleasant but concise; prompting the user when necessary, but otherwise avoiding an excess of “cuteness”, despite leveraging
We were also running out of time to develop the front-end before it was time to present, so instead we opted to show the rustic but functional back-end app alongside a clickable, fully-styled prototype (available here and shown below)
While I was coming up with the UI, the engineers had been working on the functionality. My initial hope was that we’d be able to provide more conversational answers, but with our limited time, we needed to settle for pulling paragraphs from the knowledge-base without modification.
The project my team had chosen was to develop a self-service chatbot to assist our users in trouble-shooting common issues.
We kicked off with a focused brainstorming and consensus-building session so we could, align on what we wanted to accomplish within the exceedingly short timeframe. Luckily, with a chatbot being a fairly established pattern, we could quickly break into our specialties and get to work, without the devs being held up waiting for me to design something. We knew that the devs would focus on wiring up the query functionality. Ideally we’d have enough time to skin it over with my UI, but knowing that they had some challenges ahead of them, I wasn’t counting onit. so beyond
I drew inspiration for the chatbot's design from extensive research and existing features in our product, ensuring a user-friendly and visually appealing interface. Given that the chatbot's primary role was to assist users during challenging moments, I prioritized a tone that was both friendly and straightforward—prompting users when necessary while maintaining clarity and avoiding unnecessary embellishments.
As the clock ticked down, we pivoted our approach to showcase a streamlined back-end application alongside a polished, clickable prototype. This allowed us to effectively demonstrate the functionality while still delivering an engaging user experience.
Our team won the top prize out of the 6 projects submitted for the Hack-a-thon. It was a whirlwind week, but a memorable one and we came out of the experience with the confidence that we can bang out some pretty good features when the pressure’s on.
2023
In spring 2023, our company held its second annual Hackathon. For 1 week we broke into 7 teams to work on previously selected ideas, with the aim of presenting deliverables and findings to judges and the whole department on the final day.