Hey there! I am Rebecca, a sophomore majoring in Information Systems and minoring in Media Design, pursuing an additional major in HCI.
I was a lucky “first-gen” hacker who participated in UXA’s very first Design Hackathon. Even luckier, I was on the “first-gen” winner team of the competition. Through this challenging but rewarding journey, I noticed my growing interest, confidence, and passion to become a UX practitioner.
I am also a member of the webmaster team at UXA, creating content for Interaction Nerd, our weekly newsletter.
The challenge this year is about innovation for accessibility. None of the members on my team had prior experience in this domain, so here comes the first challenge...
How might we empathize with this population from who we felt distanced and how might we learn about their needs?
Even more challenging...
How might we understand their need and come up with a solution in less than 3 days?
Feeling uncertain and struggling with great ambiguity, we spent the first evening studying and brainstorming the right problem to solve. And the second day morning, we gathered and shared our findings.
Before discovering problems to solve, I discovered people to work with — I signed up for the competition with my UCRE classmates and found our last piece during the open ceremony.
Here are a few ideas we came up with:
Our first idea seems really cool ... The second idea seems innovative ... And the third one seems most feasible ...
Alrighty, we got a handful promising directions in front of us. But we can only pick one to continue with.
So ... which ideas should we give up?
We spent a solid 3 hours discussing and debating but failed to land on a concrete resolution.
Seeing us hard to converge our thoughts, the mentors chimed in.
They suggested that we spend 10 minutes on each of the three ideas to think through and pick the one on which we generated the most plausible ideas. This highly efficient 30 minutes resulted in the agreement to pursue content moderation on media platforms like YouTube for the psychologically distressed population.
In retrospective, I really do think that the three hours that we spent on pure ideation was worthy and this made our idea really fleshed out.
We finally set on one idea and started doing lo-fi paper prototype .
Don’t worry about our work & play balance. We did all hard work after playing shark and minnows outside and exhausting my thighs.
We tried our best looking at the problems and thinking in our users’ shoes.
Yet we realize there’s still so many blind spots we ignored as we conducted user testing.
Based on the feedback we got from testing, we spent the rest of the night doing hi-fi prototype and preparing for the pitch. Just saying, it was my first time seeing Tepper at 3AM.
Finally, the presentation day. The first round was 4 minutes of pitch and 2 minutes of Q&A, with 3 pitches.
Wait... We need to pack 48-hour work in to a 4-minute pitch!?
We rushed in our speech in the first two pitches and, consequently, did not do our live demo well.
As we considered our live demo as the most essential part of our pitch, we quickly reflected on our previous pitches and discussed which parts to spend less time on to gain more time for the live demo.
To our hugest surprise, our team was announced at the very last for the first place, and I was in the resulted exhilaration for two more days.
It is hard for me to conclude what I learned from this experience just in several paragraphs, but I’ve organized and highlighted several of them below.
<aside> 👀 If you are interested in learning more, catch me and let’s chat more about Hackathon & working with UXA!
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As you might have already noticed, I naturally and unconsciously practiced the most popular human-centered design framework — the “Double-Diamond” — in my hackathon adventure.