Within my internship at Cargill, I was lucky enough to take part in a 3-day hackathon! I was placed with two other design interns and our task was to create an app that allows people to take part in a ‘meal-crawl’, similar to a bar crawl experience.
Like my main project within Cargill, I am also unable to display the work I did during this hackathon due to NDA restrictions – please reach out to me at msharm30@illinois.edu to learn more!
Because my team and I had such a short time frame to complete this project, we hit the ground running. We began by creating a rough timeline of tasks we needed to accomplish:
After this was complete, we then went on to strategize how we wanted this experience to function – we decided a mobile application would accomplish the prompt most effectively. The first thing we started on was the navigation bar for the app - because this is the main outlet for movement throughout the app, we needed to make sure it made sense from a user perspective. Once this was finished, we moved on to competitor research. Was there an app out there that was similar to the one we were trying to make? After a little bit of time, we had our answer: no! After this confirmation, we went on to our mid-fidelity wireframes. Because of the limited time, there was no room for a low-fidelity prototype. This is the stage where we added interactions between our pages to ensure the functionalities we envisioned were accurate. After this was complete, we began high-fidelity modifications by adding colors, images, and fonts. In the end, we had a fully clickable prototype with 42 app screens. We pitched to our stakeholders and won the Best Design Prototype award!
Being a part of this hackathon was truly a great experience. It taught me how to work under pressure/time crunch and learn the skill of rapid prototyping. I really feel that this mini project brought out my problem solving and leadership skills that can be applied in many areas of the design world. It felt great to win the Cargi Award (Best Design Prototype) and felt really rewarding to be recognized for all the hard work my team and I put in during those 3 days!