RiverBat Bridge
24 hours. A team of five. Second place at ACC's first-ever VisComm UX Hackathon.
United by a goal-directed design philosophy, we conceptualized and designed a digital solution to improve the online college experience by fostering community and providing an intuitive interface to find, connect, and share with other students.
Featured on iPad Air. Customized student profiles allow users to search for students across registered classes, departments, or skills & interests. Student users can connect and communicate with others to share work for critical feedback as well as collaborate on shared projects.
Leah (pictured above right) is a fictional college student enrolled in online classes. She is a single mother juggling work and school with the ultimate goal of becoming a skilled UX designer ripe for hire. Leah feels isolated from the other students in her classes and has no means to find and connect with students enrolled in other sections or different but similar classes and programs. It is important to her that the relationships she fosters with other students comply with her goal to become a professional UX designer through practice and collaboration.
Developing a linear, logical and thorough use scenario for Leah allowed us to acknowledge the tasks, constraints and interaction touch points around which to build an interface. The goal of our ideation process was to converge on a minimally viable product that met Leah's foremost needs with a familiar and intuitive interface. The maximally optimized experience would gather data on Leah related to her classes, schedules, and interests thereby formulating best-case student matches, making it within her power to coordinate how best to put these relationships to use.
This event was an affirmation of my identity as a designer, and for me the memory of it remains a symbol of inspiration and encouragement. For the most part, before this event I researched and iterated on project concepts alone save for brief feedback meetings and user testing sessions with friends and acquaintances; sometimes groups existed in online mediums like InVision's live collaboration tool or Google Hangouts. Through the weekend of the hackathon I learned not only that I excel in groups, but I that I enjoy immensely the push and pull of the single consciousness that the group grows and shares: multiple voices and experiences sow incredibly interesting ideas, and multiple opinions reap strong, logical and defensible positions. The speed and power of the group is undeniable. I look forward to more hackathon experiences in the future; and really I think every project could benefit from the hackathon model: sprints under pressure generate a creative vigor that's good for the group (and the soul!).
See the interactive prototype below...
