This was an intensive 3-day Hackathon participated by design and engineer students. The prompt: Design an experience that helps college students discover and connect to their classmates. Deliver a working prototype and a pitch of the solution at the end.
Provided with an open-ended prompt, we identified the social anxiety faced by college students in networking events as the design problem: Initiating conversations with strangers in events is intimidating and embarrassing.
Project Duration
July 2019, 3 Days
Team
Macie Wan, Yang Bai Product Designer
Alison Norris Front-end Engineer
Christian Watson Back-end Engineer
My Role
Product Designer + Project Manager
Key Skills
Concept Ideation
Interaction Design
Visual Design
Prototyping
Project Management
As a result, we came up with Matchy: A mobile-based event app that lowers the barrier to networking by pairing students up with a small number of like-minded participants when they arrive at the event, to initiate conversations.
Our teamwork won first place and was highly praised on UX, technology, and pitch presentation by both the judges and later the VPs at LinkedIn.
We directly adapted the grading rubrics and LinkedIn's UX Design Principles into our success metrics. These goals helped us make design decisions quickly throughout the fast-paced development cycle.
Valuable: Our product provides personalized, discoverable, and actionable paths that connect people to opportunity
Inclusive: Our product is fully supportive of diverse cultures and capabilities
Encouraging: Our product empowers and impresses users with a delightful and smart design
Efficient: Our working prototype must be delivered on time
We focused on front-loading our generative research in the first day of the hackathon: I facilitated the brainstorm sessions on problem areas and after picking the direction, we interviewed two employees from LinkedIn on their networking experience back in school. We also collected opinions from acquaintances who attended many networking events. Here are the insights we synthesized:
So what if, you no longer need to worry about who to approach and how to start? Matchy lowers the barrier to entry for networking by pairing you up with a small number of like-minded "Matchy Buddies" to initiate conversations, based on your interests. The app’s goal is to be the go-to platform for networking events, building meaningful, lasting connections that will empower your future.
Take Yuka's journey as an example:
Yuka signed in Matchy with her LinkedIn account. Matchy then customized her event feed using her areas of interest, home organization, and current city.
Yuka easily found a free Hackathon meetup that matched her interest in tech. Moreover, she felt encouraged because some of her LinkedIn connections are also going.
The event day arrived! After checking-in at the reception, Yuka revealed her Matchy Card for this meetup and soon spotted the same card in the crowd. Yuka joined the conversation, enjoying the chat about women who code.
Yuka could also connect her Matchy Buddies on LinkedIn and other social media, as well as track her networking progress on the profile page. She went home feeling neither intimidating nor passive, but confident and encouraged.
Three keywords from our Success Goals became the major input to our design decisions: Inclusive, Valuable, Encouraging. These words help us design unique features, navigate disagreement on details, and also guided me through my personal revamp of this project.
After chatting with the judges and Sarah (VP User Experience at LinkedIn), we had a clearer idea on how to make Matchy work business-wise. Thus, I created this concept map about how Matchy can utilize data to bridge the gap between event participants and event sponsors, creating values that can empower both sides.
Hackathon Judges
Sarah Alpern, VP User Experience at LinkedIn
With previous experience collaborating with front and back-end engineers, I know what drives engineers crazy and what makes them relieve. So I volunteered to serve as the bridge between designers and engineers and took the lead in project management.
My rules of thumb were:
These rules equipped us to make a winning demo within 24 working hours. But as smooth as the demo look, we understand the importance of validation, since details from he number of participants to how long will the reception be open can all affect the experience drastically. If I were to push this project further, I would build archetypes for different user groups and events, break down the journey respectively in finer granularity, and user test the core features under respective scenarios.