7+1 tips for designers about hackathons
How we won our first hackathon focusing on little big details.
Hackathons are creative platforms for creating new solutions and searching for a new perspective on how and which way the industry could advance in its improvements.
Many industry-focused hackathons such as fintech, insurtech, edtech, etc. competitions are working as idea shops. Stakeholders and juries want to hear about kickass technological advancements but even the best high-tech pitches can fail without having a clear business concept, a solid product strategy, and a clear presentation. And that is where designers come into place!
If you are a designer and thinking about attending the next hackathon, then hit that apply button now!
Hackathons are great communication practice between you and your developer fellows in a very fast-paced environment, and you will eventually improve your speed, craft, and workflow as well! You can also experience a short but end-to-end design process!
We participated in many hackathons with the Family Finances team. One of our favorites was Novathon by Intesa Sanpaolo where we took the 1st prize last year! We built an iOS app in 24 hours, that helps banks introduce investment services to millennials! But this is not a case study, so…
… Here is a practical guide what approaches you should use and what tools come in handy when you run a design sprint faster than a bullet:
1. Set up the right team
This is an old but gold one! Working 24 caffeine-fueled hours straight is less challenging in a coherent and dynamic team.
Our usual setup is the following:
- one visual designer (Branding, UX/UI design, Motion design)
- one business analyst (Research, Strategy, Pitch)
- one full-stack developer or a front end and a back-end guy
We always go to competitions with our core team but it’s also a great idea to go alone as a single designer and join a cool team. Most teams lack designers so they are very happy if you can help them out with your visual and product mindset!
Things to keep in mind:
- Cross-functional and diverse teams might build stronger solutions
- Delegating tasks is harder at hackathons so it’s easier to go with senior people.
2. Be prepared, choose your task wisely!
I would say that hackathons don’t work like flashmobs and it can be challenging to collect every little chunk of information so don’t leave it to the day of the event.
We usually scroll through the challenges on the event’s microsite and ask relevant questions: Do we have experience in this topic? Did we build something similar in the past? (If not, maybe that’s the reason we should pick that one). Do we have the right stack?
It’s also great to write an email to the main organizer in case you need more detailed answers and we also like to test the banking sandbox APIs beforehand.
3. Do your research! Go, guerilla!
Some would argue here and state that you should skip this part on such competitions because of the ridiculously small amount of time given.
But If you look around on a hackathon you can easily recognize that the stakeholders whom you develop your outstanding idea for are usually sitting right next room, so it’s a bummer not to shoot questions at them. You should not focus on quantitative data in such a competition but rockstar ideas are formed with the help of mentors’, stakeholders’ and potential users’ insights.
At Novathon 2018 we decided to disrupt investments so we interviewed 3 of the relevant stakeholders and 3 potential users. Guess what! They were all lurking around the bar, waiting for lunch looking at their smartphones in boredom. After 2 hours of chatting and synthesizing the interview insights, we shifted gears and created a service blueprint which instantly led to the wireframing part.
Things to keep in mind:
- Keep it short: Don’t ask more than 5 questions at a time.
- Try to validate your idea and make it bulletproof with stakeholder insights
- Side events before the hack before can help you make research discussions early on!
4. Product strategy vs. Geeking out the concept
The stakeholders we interviewed were amongst the high-level executives of the participating bank and they made it clear that investments are a lucrative business for the bank and that’s super hard to broaden this service to younger generations. Building solutions which can fix real pain points in a big organization are more likely to win a hackathon in most cases than a very development-heavy approach.
Things to keep in mind:
- If you are on an industry-specific hackathon: Work on an idea which resonates with the current strategy of the sponsor company!
- Solve a business problem and aim for a solution which is not just a fancy-looking user-facing one but it is also possible to build a solid business model around it.
5. Handling the handover
The ultimate design thinking phrase “Show don’t tell” plays an important role here. If you want to create stunning UI animations: build the prototype, don’t leave your developer fellows hanging.
Tools to use:
- Use a handover tool such as Zeplin, Avocode or InVision Inspect. Here is a great article about how to stay organized: https://www.netguru.com/blog/zeplin-how-to-handle-the-handover-process-like-a-pro
- Use a prototyping tool for high fidelity animations. InVision Studio, Principle and Framer X are leading the game. Here is my previous article showcasing Principle in our design process: https://medium.muz.li/drops-an-instant-payment-platform-ux-ui-case-study-f09dfe6ea186
6. Use your quick wins
Simplify branding
Usually it isn’t necessary at hackathons to create a kickass branding for your hack. For branding I would suggest you stay as simple as possible because it’s not the right time to create that amazing logo-metaphor.
For colours, you can find amazing inspirations at the links below. If you are working on a challenge provided by an exact company/bank/etc. then use their identity! If there is no brand guideline available, improvise! Use a color picker tool or find secondary colors using the tools at the following links:
Tools to use:
- Coolors
- Adobe Color
- Color picker tools like Classic Color Meter
UI kits
Using UI kits is a very time efficient way of trying out different layouts and techniques and its really accelerate your design workflow. UI8 is a great online marketplace for UI designers where you can find icons, mobile and web resources. It’s important that you shouldn’t copy and paste but use patterns and ideas instead.
Use your existing patterns:
I think it’s okay to reuse even code components for the UI part of your hack. Nobody will judge you if you copied that navigation bar from your previous app! It’s better focusing on the solution and not on the UI glitches.
7. Pitch time!
Storytelling is more important than ever if you want to fight against the very low attention span of your fellow audience. It’s very important to adapt our story to different communication channels and make it our competitive advantage. I’ve heard hundreds of pitches and the best ones are always convince the audience with incredible and emotional stories.
Books to read:
+1 Secret sauce (video, Prezi)
Our secret sauce to every hackathon is a strong and dynamic teaser video and also a live or recorded demo. It’s really important to make the demo as the highlight of your pitch and build an organized content around it.
For creating kickass custom teasers, I would recommend you to use After Effects like we did in our demo but there is also Rotato which lets you create animations in minutes without any knowledge of 3d.
We also like to use Prezi for the presentations because it gives the audience a sense of overview without the boring slides that separate the different sections. Also, inserting a video is very smooth and your whole demo is in motion.
