Design Hackathon

// I remember the look the design team gave me when I first announced the Design Hackathon last year. Everyone was confused, what is a Design Hackathon?

Indeed, this may be unique to us.

When I was appointed to lead the design team, there were multiple challenges to overcome. Designers from each product were working in silos. Our design system was not well-received, hence low adoption. There was no unity between the products, and the team’s morale was at risk because of all the changes happening within the organization.

What concerned me the most, was the level of creativity shown. As someone new to the team, it wasn’t clear to me whether the outputs were due to the existing design system or the designers. It felt constrained.

I wanted to provide a safe playground for the team to express their ideas and creativity. I needed a platform to tell the team that it’s okay to break the rules. I’d like to see how everyone thinks their ideal state should be if there’s no constraint. Here came the idea of Design Hackathon.

So what is it?

It’s really simple. Inspired by the traditional hackathon that’s driven by the engineering team, a design hackathon is to hack the product via design. The beauty of it is that there’s technically no limit. Of course, it’s also important to set up goals/themes, or it can go too wild and would not deliver any business value.

The very first theme was about the general UI and UX, as the design system was facing criticism and push on its aesthetics. I asked the team if they had all the freedom to reimagine our products, how would they look like. At first, there was a lot of uneasiness for the team to break the rules and not follow the existing design system, but I was really glad to see the outcome. The team was inspired by seeing other designers’ creativity. It also gave me a great chance to understand the team better by seeing their original designs. The ideas later inform our new design system. Even better, in the second hackathon, we focused on AI. It was when we started to have a better gtip of AI’s potential. I encouraged the team to think about how it could integrate with our products and empower our users. This time around, not only was everyone more adapting to the idea of a design hackathon, the ideas that came out of it were really stellar. There were so many great ideas, that we formed a design guild to finalize the interaction design and guidelines. How amazing was that!

And early last month, we just had our third design hackathon. This time, I asked everyone to focus on the idea of “One” — how could we tell the One story from our design when we have many different products with different technologies. Of course, the team once again surprised me with lots of superb ideas. After seeing our hackathon presentations, the product organization was so excited, that some of them are now prioritized on the roadmap. This is exactly how design can truly make an impact. When an idea is translated into something visual, the likelihood of realizing it is exponential.

For those who are looking for avenues to advocate for design, I highly recommend giving this a try, make your own rules and agenda.

This is also published on Medium.