Website Design / Front-End /
Earth | Summer 2024
Earth is an all-in-one hackathon management platform dedicated to providing a seamless experience for organizers, hackers and judges during in-person and virtual corporate hackathons by facilitating all the necessary information in one place.
Timeline
July 2024
(4 weeks)
Team
1 Product Manager
1 Designer (Me)
3 Developers
Constraint
Short turnaround time
Limited Resources
Impact
9/10 Average Promoter Score
100% Would use the features
Earth had finished running 2 corporate hackathons and a bunch of feedback was left from our users. The product manager and I wanted to review the feedback and decide on the next step to take before the next hackathon happen in 1 month.
Goal:
To improve Earth's experience for the organizers and participants based on their feedback
Earth didn't have preexisting personas. I felt that I could better design if I put myself in the shoes of Earth users, so I built 2 primary persona to think about how I interact with Earth.
Only 39% of participants would recommend Earth to a friend or a future hackathon
Gather & Categorize Feedback
We received primarily qualitative feedback directly from users’ and organizers post-hackathon surveys. I categorized them based on features to identify which features have the most room for improvement or where users are happiest.
A messy (but realistic) view of the categorized feedback
The product manager and I ranked each feature improvement using the RICE method to evaluate where our resources should be allocated.
As they are issues that impact both the organizers and participants.
01.
Project Submission Form
Participants — were not able to save their progress which caused immense stress in the last hours of the hackathon.
Organizers — do not have enough resources to provide technical support towards the end of the hackathon.
02.
Joining Live Sessions
Participants — looking to join live sessions on Earth is frustrated when they are redirected to their email for the join link.
Organizers — an estimated 25 hours were spent on sending invites and attendance is low.
03.
Team Formation
Participants — had a hard time finding team members with similar interests.
Organizers — Misaligned teams result in low-quality submissions.
Design Challenge #1
How might we design a smoother project submission process for participants?
One way to improve their experience is through adding the ability to save their submission progress.
We wanted participants:
To promptly save and submit the submission
To be able to view their submission history and confirmation of submissions
Design Decision
Presentation of Submission Status
✅
Compact and Minimalist: With button and historical submission
✅
Intuitive: Placed where users can expect to submit their project
❌
Delayed Communication: of save progress functionality
✅
Visually Impactful
✅
Clear and Intuitive: With familiar color conventions
❌
Limited Visual Progression: Progression is not communicated
Design Challenge #2
How might we streamline the experience of adding live sessions?
The current experience of joining live sessions is problematic:
Inefficient Management
There is no functionality for participants to pre-save sessions onto their calendars.
For organizers, manually sending out calendar invites in advance is highly time-consuming and labour-intensive.
Cognitive Overload
For participants, it is hard to stay actively engaged on Earth since the primary action to join live sessions is taken outside of Earth.
Inability to Scale
The platform is struggling to expand beyond its current offerings of live sessions since any additional live sessions would require a massive undertaking.
Design Decision
Add Live Session Flow
✅
User Control: Add sessions that interest them without cluttering their calendar
✅
Quick Build: From a developer’s standpoint
❌
Time-Consuming: If participant wants to join multiple sessions
❌
Fragmented Calendar Experience: No batch approach which makes it harder to keep track what is already added
✅
Efficient for Multiple Adds: Saving time and reducing repetitive actions
✅
Greater Control Over Meeting Selection: Offering a balance between control and convenience
❌
Requires Additional Steps: which could deter some participants
✅
Highly Convenient: Removes the need for manual selection, saving time
✅
Automatic Updates: Meeting updates and new meetings are always up-to-date
❌
Lack of Control: Potentially cluttering their calendar with meetings they aren’t interested in.
❌
Commitment Concerns: Participants may be unsure about the frequency or relevance of all the meetings, which could reduce engagement.
'Multi-Select Add' was agreed upon as the ideal solution. However, the developer team's reduced availability and time constraints made us reconsider and move forward with 'Single-Meeting Add' as the most appropriate solution.
Design Challenge #3
How might we get participants to form more efficient teams?
Participants found it difficult to work with team members in different time zones and misaligned areas of interests.
Insights:
40% of participants worked with people they know
~58% of participants looked up people they wanted to work with
Things that participants want to know:
skill level
areas of interest
personality
past hackathon/work experience
Design Decision
Profile Completion
✅
Higher Profile Completeness: Improves data quality for personalization
❌
Increased Friction: Long signup process, which likely leads to a higher drop-off rate
❌
Lower Flexibility: Users may not understand the importance of profile details, likely lead to lower quality data entry
✅
Encourages Organic Profile Development: Potentially resulting in more thoughtful, accurate responses
❌
Delayed Personalization
Taking the best of both worlds
Using the "sign up and write up" concept as the base, I brought in elements of the "reminders" that made it more engaging.
Made questions optional and a button for the user to complete later
Reminder on the dashboard is more prevalent
Additionally, a team member suggestion section is added to the dashboard
Presentation of Member Suggestion
✅
Familiar to User
✅
Saving Vertical Space: Keeping the main page more compact and focused.
❌
Limited Visibility of Items
❌
Mobile Experience: will likely need customized components
✅
Recycling Existing Components
✅
Better for Comparison: based on experience, skill level, area of interest
❌
Not Visually Distinct
Due to budget and time constraints, we decided to prioritize the organizer’s experience, and omitted some features. I tweaked the case study for the prioritized features.
I settled on a think-aloud & probing approach for its speed and cost-effectiveness. We tested our new join live session flow and submission banners on a focus group of 5 users through a guided prototype I built in Maze.
I defined 2 questions to centre our usability testing around:
How well does the participant understand our join live session flow?
How intuitive was the submission status banners?
Testing was a success! Some key feedback pieces we noted for our next iteration were related to automation — ideally the user would like to see auto-save as the default for saving progress.
9/10 Average Promoter Score
100% Would use the features
Result
Small, iterative improvements were made rather than sweeping changes.
Join Live Session Flow
Project Submission
You can’t always ship a "perfect" product…
Would I have liked to do more testing? Yes. More iterations? Yes. Fancier designs? Yes. But the value delivered in shipping a product sooner sometimes outweighs refining more details... and we can always ship updates later ;)
Your design for 1 end user influences the experience of another end user
This is my first platform design project, I had to put myself in the perspective of multiple end users to gain a comprehensive view of my design. Sometimes, what would be great for the participants may create more friction for the organizers. Vice versa. It’s the sweetest when my design strikes that perfect balance!
Sometimes, the small features make a big difference
We received requests for many small features/improvements to be made on Earth. While these features independently may only improve the experience of a small portion of participants, the small things add up and help create an overall better experience for all users.
Design problems can sometimes be very specific
Given the encompassing user feedback for this product, I had very specific user problems with very specific solutions. Even so, I approached the problems with an open mind and validated assumptions to ensure the right problem was solved with the right solution.