Hackathons! What was your imagination when you heard this word?

Well, my image was a bunch of nerdy developers trying to write endless lines of code, to build something brilliant in a short span of time, without Jira tickets.

The drive for hackathon participation typically lies in the drive to execute the idea or may be sometimes just do something that is fun!

Why do you want to bring designers here?

While the importance of designers is well understood in the context of building a product (I hope so!), usually hackathons are not where you will find designers since there is no time for user research, testing, pixel perfect polishing and all the other design jargon.

Let’s see anyway why designers can be helpful in a hackathon team?

Help weave a story

Along with building in short times, hackathons are also about pitching your idea. It is the perfect fit for what is called as an elevator pitch. You get a time slot where you talk about your idea, show the idea, blah blah blah. Yes exactly the last three words! No matter how much late night code you wrote, unless you showcase it well, it looks like blah blah blah to anyone! Tell me about all the presentations you slept through!

While you do the building, your designer can do the pitching and packaging of the product into a story. I am talking about the examples that you pick to help drive the problem statement, the narrative of building interest throughout the presentation, the right medium to showcase the demo and more! After all, please don’t make presentations dry in 2022!

Ask the right questions

Yeah this seems to be the “Bramhastra” in the quiver of designers and hurts the feelings of others who are well capable of asking questions! 😂

Setting fun aside, in case of a hackathon, it can be very easy to attach yourself to the idea and sometimes to the solution, even if it is obvious that there are better ways in which you can solve the problem. This can also be the case when choosing between two ideas or two different solutions too!

Your designer can help you think objectively without getting attached to ideas or the solution, but instead by getting attached to the problem space. This can probably help save sad faces on the last day of the hackathon, when you are looking for a time machine to go back and try a different idea or a different solution. This may look contradictory to the inspiration of participating in a hackathon, which is to build without overthinking, but a little polish here and there and a trophy at the end cannot hurt right?

Finally yes — make it look good!

I don’t have to explain this a lot — this is what most people think that designers are for! If you have two projects doing mostly the same thing, the one that looks good, mostly feels superior. This is simply because making it look good needs attention and it evokes a feeling that the overall project is also well thought and presented. A well designed GUI or command line utility pleases the eyes and helps connect!

Well, I will stop here. Get a designer for your next hackathon project and let me know what you think!

I am a UX designer, sometimes a developer and a content writer. Checkout my design portfolio at yakshaG.github.io