I joined Hackillinois during the summer of 2023 as a designer, working with five other designers for the app development and website development of the largest hackathon in the Midwest at UIUC.
I collaborated with other designers as well as software engineers from the system team. My main role was to create designs that were easy to understand and use for the attendees and provide them with the best experience for their hackathon.
UI/UX designer
July 2023- Feb 2024
The main purpose of the app is to provide a smooth check-in process for the participants and information for the participants about the ongoing events, schedule of the hackathons, and redeeming prizes
The main users of the app are the participants of the Hackathon around 1000 participants from different colleges and the Hackillinois staff
I don’t have experience attending and registering for a hackathon so I spent time looking at previous years’ hackathon websites and other hackathons hosted by different colleges to understand the main features and registration features. I also discussed with the designers from last year to get feedback from last year's participants
After several meetings with the system team, I went through a lot of iterations based on the feedback
Shift Tab
For the schedule page, we chose to separate the schedule and shift tabs to differentiate the staff shifts and the actual events which is a new feature that we decided to implement.
Time Stamps
I realized that it is confusing for the users to understand the order of the events and the time. By adding time stamps it makes it faster for the users to skim through the timeline of the events.
Dietary Restrictions
We added the dietary labels to make the food distribution process smoother and faster.
This project helps me have a better understanding of how to collaborate with other teams to collaboratively develop an application and make sure the participants get the best experience coming to our event. It helped me practice my UX thinking because, throughout the project, I had a lot of discussions to collect feedback on the design decisions on several features that might affect the user’s experience.
Since this project did not have that many UX research and process, I came up with the ideas to send out a survey with questions to collect user feedback and further improve our design for next years.
