BrainStation Hackathon Experience
Date: November 22, 2019
Location: BrainStation - Vancouver Campus
Duration: 7 hours
Team: Rita Law, Winona Huang, Matthew MacLellan (User Experience Design)
Russell Winters, Rylan Ferrer, Ivy Mageto (Web Development)
Mitchell McCaig (Data Science)
The brief
TED talks and working professionals.
The challenge
Build a webpage that visualizes insights from data that is designed to communicate information to your target demographic.
How might we…
inspire working professionals to share their perspectives on topics that interest the general public so that TEDx can be more thoughtfully curated?
Proposed solution
A feature on the TED talks web page that allows users to easily apply to be a speaker at a TEDx event and allow the public to cast votes and gain traction if the topic is popular.
If successful, TEDx will assist with promoting and marketing the TEDx event.
The Journey
The hackathon was hosted by BrainStation grouped six teams together, each with students from different disciplines (Web Development, Data Science and User Experience Design). I worked closely with 2 other user experience design students, 3 web development students and 1 data science student. Our allocated time started at 9:30 am and presentations for our digital solution was due at 4:30 pm, sharp.
Collectively, we collaborated to brainstorm different approaches by starting off with some basic research about TED talks and we found that the process to land a speaker position on the TED talks stage is quite extensive - the routes that an aspiring speaker would take is to join TED’s fellowship programs, nominate yourself, be nominated or start off at a local TEDx event. Since we were focusing on working professionals, we narrowed down our solution to focus on TEDx as it is community driven and our assumption is that our solution needed to be simple and straightforward as our target demographic work full-time and are starting off as aspiring speakers, not experts.
Time: 9:30 AM
To start off our morning, we decided to work together as an entire team to brainstorm ideas on the whiteboard and determine what was feasible to be built in 7 hours. We went through the different user journey that working professionals would go through if they wanted to land a position on the TED talks stage and decided to focus on starting off with being a speaker at a TEDx event. With the data provided, we were able to categorize what were the most popular categories watched, how many views to expect per category and how long the average TEDx talk is per category. With that information, we brainstormed some more about how to visually show the information without it being overwhelming for users.
We started to develop our How Might We question to ensure that our team was aligned on what the problem is and what we were aiming for as a solution:
How might we inspire working professionals to share their perspectives on topics that interest the general public so that TEDx can be more thoughtfully curated?
We then took time individually to sketch out possible layouts and solutions:
Time: 11:30 AM
Right before lunch, we voted on proceeding to start building our web page with the design concept (above, 1st sketch) that users would be able to navigate to a page where they could browse the top, most popular topics and learn more about each topic in more detail. We then wanted to ensure there was a section that gives a bit more detail as to how the application process works and proceed with their application all on one page to avoid multiple interactions with multiple pages.
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM - LUNCH
Time: 1:00 PM
As soon as we came back from our lunch break, it was crunch time, we (designers) began to design the layout and mock up for our web development team to start building. We worked closely together to make sure they were on board with the components being designed to avoid re-designing if they were unable to complete it with the short amount of time. Meanwhile, our data science side focused on creating graphs and cleaning up data for accurate representations of the popular categories. It was important for our graphs to be easy to navigate and understand for users and look on brand with TEDx.
Mock up:
Time: 3:30 PM
While our web developers and data scientist were coding and building the web page & graph, Matthew worked on a user journey flow for our presentation, Winona created our persona and I assisted with the written content to be included on the web page.
Time: 4:30 PM
Presentations began at 4:30 sharp. Unfortunately our team did not win however the hackathon experience was both challenging and rewarding at the same time - so it was ultimately a win! It challenged each of us to think outside of the box and to work with a time constraint. On top of it all, I learned a lot about the different disciplines and the collaboration was fun!
Our final product:
