Client: General Assembly Hackathon.
Duration : 24 hours.
Process: Research, Competitive Analysis, Sketching, Persona creation, User Flow, Paper Prototype, Wireframes, User Testing.
My Role: Sketching, Wireframes, User Interface Design, Usability Testing.
Tools : Axure RP, Google Slides.
The General Assembly Seattle campus posted a challenge to group of designers and developers. The challenge is to design and build a simple HTML5 app that "makes life better". This can be anything from helping simplify someone’s day, help them lead healthier lives or just bring a bit of joy to their life.
Some of the constraints were:
Our team consists of two developers and two designers (incuding myself). We all got together and started brainstorming ideas. After fixing on using Urban Dictionary API, we found the idea of being able to replace common, proper words with their slang counterparts in everyday conversation to be hilarious, and the ability to look up slang to be useful. After talking about a few features that turned into stretch goals, the developers confirmed that it would be possible to build an MVP in this amount of time.
Some of the competitors I looked into are American slang, Slangit, Urban Dictionary.
Checkout the demo below:
How to collaborate with developers. It was a great experience and our developers were extremely talented. It was great talking with them about restrictions and what we can build within the given time limit. Myself having the experience with the front end developement skills, I was able to understand and design the project that can be built within the given timeframe.
The importance of hand drawn sketches and paper prototype. We were able to communicate our ideas to developers effectively using our paper prototype. They were able to see how the interactions work and build them accordingly. When announcing the result, the judges mentioned that one of the reason we won, is our team collaboration and how we interacted with each other using sketches, paper prototype.