My coworker Jesalyn Smith asked me to join her team for this year’s Hackathon, and I naively agreed. I had NO idea what I was getting into (looking at you, stressfully editing our pitch video in the last 15 minutes), but I’m sure glad I joined in. Here’s what I learned and what I believed made our team so successful:
1) Constraints breed creativity.
I get it, it’s hard to feel creative when you’re designing and developing OOB. However, it forces you to get intentional about the things you do implement and use the functionality of OOB widgets in new and interesting ways.
2) Only you have your ideas.
As a UX designer in a room full of developers, it’s hard to feel like I have much to say in the way of features and functionality. And it’s hard to feel like you have something to contribute when the solution seems so obvious to you. In his session, Jon Batiste said, “The best ideas win.” Your idea could be the winner or refine the winning idea even more.
3) Planning is key.
8 hours seems like a long time, yeah? Well, it went QUICK. Before the hackathon even started, we already had a rough idea of what we wanted to accomplish, who was going to take on what task, and what tools we were going to work with. That way, we hit the ground running. (And a shoutout to our regular project management teams, who do the messy work of making all that planning seem so seamless.)
4) Iteration over perfection.
I don’t know about the rest of our team, but I have already thought of the million ways I would improve the UI of what we created. But done is truly better than perfect. If we had gotten bogged down in the perfection of it, we would have only been able to submit a perfect barely functioning thing, instead of a pretty decent mostly functioning thing.
5) Human connection and community will triumph.
After this year’s Knowledge, my new sleep paralysis demon wears sunglasses and asks me if I’m jacked up for Gen AI. It’s hard to stay motivated in this year of our AI Overlords 2024. The overall essence of our app celebrates CreatorCon and implements a creative idea to make the Knowledge more fun, interactive, and community-driven. AI is a wonderful tool that will help us optimize and economize, but it will never replace the connections we make with one another.