What I learned attending a 3-hour design protothon
Last month, my friends and I from the Masters of Human-Computer Interaction + Design program attended a 3-hour prototyping hackathon (aka protothon) to put our design skills to practice. The event was sponsored by Google Cloud Platform and was hosted by Dubstech at the University of Washington.
The design prompt:
“A 2015 Google study found about 60% of millennials cook with their smartphone in hand. Design a solution that simplifies the cooking process. Users should be able to navigate through the platform to find helpful information that would adapt to their needs for planning, prepping, and cooking a meal.”
The cooking experience can vary significantly depending on the context that millennials are in. There could be multiple challenges at each phase of the process from planning and prepping to cooking. The experience is also different for those that do big-batch meal prep vs. those that cook with a small portion on a daily basis. Leveraging existing research and our personal experiences, we speculated that millennials struggle most in the prepping and cooking phase. There are 2 main challenges that millennials are facing:
- There’s a lot of task-switching between reading cooking instructions and prepping ingredients.
- Cooking apps and their instructions currently don’t personalize or accommodate people’s cooking styles and preferences.
In 3 hours, our team went through the design process from discussing the user journey, brainstorming, and prototyping high fidelity screens. After the discussion, while Yomna and I defined in-app structure and interactions, Oliver turned paper sketches into high fidelity mockup screens. We then pitched Google Chef to the judges and the protothon attendees.
About Google Chef
Google Chef is a conversational partner that guides users through the cooking process. Making cooking handsfree, personal, and easy.
What I’ve learned
Embrace uncertainty
Time was the biggest constraint for the whole experience. While I would have loved to have a thoughtful design process that required more user research than just some quick searches, I had to be realistic with our time. We definitely didn’t explore the full spectrum of challenges that millennials face during the cooking process, yet the experience allowed me to feel more comfortable moving forward with uncertainty. This 3-hour experience articulates a crucial perception that also applies to any full-scale project. There are always more things to learn and a desire to conduct more research, identifying what the right level of confidence is and when to move forward is a critical skill that helps designers carry out an efficient design process.
Teamwork and time management
One of the factors that helped our team win the competition was trust and time management. We communicated and leveraged each other’s strengths and skill sets as soon as we received the brief. Once trust and expectations were well established, the entire collaboration effort fell into place when it came to brainstorming, generating ideas, wireframing, and producing high-fidelity mockups. To make sure we wouldn’t fall into any rabbit hole or overspend our time in a particular area, our team rigidly kept track of time for each step while providing good amount flexibility for the overall process.
Have fun!
Above all, hackathons serve as a platform to help designers practice their skills and bring people with similar interests together. Competition is only an entertaining component that helps make the experience fun and incentivizes teams to perform better. When attending a hackathon, walk in with a beginner mindset, get ready for the challenge, and have fun!
