Category: hackathons

Posted on

The Occasional Mentor: On Constraints in Service Design and Hiring Freelancers

THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR:
A monthly column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below are questions I answered in January.

What Projects Did You Create in a Hackathon? How Hard Was It to Create It in a Limited Time?

Answered 1/5/2018

Working within constraints is an important skill of any good product designer. At a hackathon, your constraints include time, of course, as well as available data, resources and the knowledge and skill of your team members. I try to join diverse groups that include at least one person who understands the underlying subject matter and available data, one strong open source developer and one designer/researcher type (usually that’s me). If you use and understand open source data and tools you likely have access to more resources than other teams, so unless the hackathon is restricted to proprietary tools and data, it gives you an edge.

Hackathon projects I’ve done (I try to do at least one per year):

The Nature Conservancy Stormwater Challenge: I hosted a service design hackathon in October 2018 with the goal to encourage private property owners to implement Stormwater mitigation technology.

Empathy Jam: My team created a prototype job training platform at the 2017 Empathy Jam.

United Nations Unite For Humanity: I co-chaired a weekend hackathon in 2016 with the goal to create anti terrorist projects. The winning project employed machine learning to disrupt terrorist networks. Other submitted projects included a stateless e911 network and a SMS based marketplace for emergency supplies.

NYPL Open Audio Hackathon: In 2016, my team created a tool to add multimedia content to audio podcasts.

NYPL Open Book Hack: I went twice. The first year, my team created a PDF to reflowable ePub converter for Supreme Court opinions. The next year, my team created a poetry recommendation tool. Based on poems and genres a user likes, it created a booklet with twenty poems.

Upcoming Hackathon: Escape from New York

I will be mentoring at MD5’s ‪Escape from New York Mass Evacuation hackathon in NYC the weekend of February 22-24. This Defense Department Hackathon features $45k in awards. Let me know if you’d like to bring a team or participate as a mentor. There are a few student and professional tickets left but you have to  have a promotional code to unlock them. Visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/escape-from-new-york-a-massive-evacuation-hackathon-tickets-51211081724‬

Where do I find and hire freelance UI/UX designers?

Answered 1/5/2019

TL;DR: Good UX designers pass on any job description that says “UI/UX”. Don’t use it. Instead use a title that describes what the person is actually going to do.

For hiring designers, I’ve had good luck with TopTal, but I prefer to go on Slack groups and get out to meetups to really get to know people I want to work with. I don’t like Dribble or Behance for UX people. It’s typically a lot of eye-candy that shows very little of the designer’s process. If there is a designer I like who has a portfolio there, I’ll look, but I wouldn’t start there from scratch.

A good UX designer will show their process: the methods they use, the choices they made, even the designs they discarded. A good portfolio give you a sense of the problem space and challenges and will have a clear description of the person’s role. You can’t tell any of this from a glossy, finished product photo.

I strongly suggest that you not use the term “UX/UI” in the job description. As others have stated, it is too broad to really be meaningful. Most User Experience people will see that and read “visual design” which may or may not include everything from graphic design, animation, typography and stylesheets. Some good candidates may assume you want a front-end developer, and give the role a pass, because developers typically don’t do UX.

It’s better to use a title that describes what the person is actually going to do.

UI people typically are front-end designers and often are expected to know how to code. While UI fits into the UX umbrella, most UX Designers will be focused on user journeys, personas, user advocacy and may or may not do research. UI people use research, but don’t necessarily produce it themselves and may be a step or two removed from the user research process.

There is a rather hot debate going on as to whether UX Designers should know how to code. Most designers and researchers that identify as “UX” people do not code. I’m from the camp that says it helps, but if they are mostly coding (unless it’s to put together prototypes for testing and they don’t have devs to do that for them), they’re probably not a UX “designer”.

Bottom line: You need users to do UX design. You could make a case for researching logs and customer support database, but since it’s after release, that’s really user acceptance testing, not UX. The user experience design process starts with user testing way before you release a product and occurs along with development, launch and beyond. And if you aren’t applying user research and integrating users into your design processes or at least talking to them, its just not UX .

Posted on

Hackathons: Prizes, Waitlists and Making Introductions

I answer questions about UX, Information Architecture and other topics on Quora. A selection of these answers will be reposted on Medium with occasional, minor editing for clarity. The following questions about hackathons appeared in my inbox in August and September of 2016.

If I win a prize at a hackathon, should I put it on LinkedIn?

Hackathons are no longer just about security, pen testing or “hacking” in a systems infiltration sense. I’ve been to hackathons that were about developing a solution to a humanitarian problem, creating a product that utilizes open data, and regular lock-picking type contests. Even the pen test type is losing, if not already lost, its negative reputation. If you won a hackathon, it means you were the best at whatever challenge was put before you. So go ahead and claim that prize. Be sure to link to any materials you publish about the project, like Github or winners page at the hackathon site.

Which school should I put on Hackathon registrations?

I started studying and will graduate from X university in country A, but I am currently on a one-semester exchange program so I am studying at Y university in country B. When I am applying to hackathons in country B, should I put school X or school Y?

Since you are affiliated with both universities you should be able to put down either or both If the entry form is free text. If there is a requirement, discount or preferential status for the local program, use that. If it seems that international affiliation may be an advantage, use that one. Some hackathons like to brag about having international participation. If you aren’t sure and you can only pick one, ask the organizers.

Does getting in the waitlist in mhacks a polite way of saying I’m not invited?

It likely means they met capacity. If anyone cancels you would move up on the wait list. The organizers may be able to tell you how many people are ahead of you, or it’s possible they may open up registrations if they reach a significant number of interested people over the maximum. I’ve done that when it looked like the weather was going to be bad and we might have low turnout. I’ve also been able to book a bigger room when it looked like there was a lot of interest. But a lot of time it depends on how many people you need to help facilitate and volunteer per # of attendees.

You also could offer to volunteer but you may end up running around instead of getting to participate in hacking. But showing a lot of interest, as long as you aren’t demanding or annoying about it, might move you up faster if the organizers have that discretion.

By the way, If by “not invited” you mean “can’t just go anyway,” don’t crash the event. It takes a lot of planning to do an event like this well. Room capacity, food/drinks, security all need to be planned up front. And you may not be let in anyway.

What do Hackathons want when they ask “Tell me something interesting about yourself?”

I’m used to in job interviews them asking questions like this such as “tell me about yourself” and they don’t want your personal life. Are hackathons the same or do they really just want an interesting fact about you

Think of it this way. You are about to spend a considerable and compressed amount of time with a team of people you may not know, working toward a common challenge. Your prospective team mates will want to know your basic skillset, your experience or interest in the challenge topics and generally whether they can get along with you well enough to be on your team.

I went to two Hackathons this summer at New York Public Library and the United Nations. At NYPL I was a participant and introduced myself as a UX designer and researcher and because it was an open audio hack I said what my favorite podcasts were. At the UN I was on the organizing team for uniteforhumanity.com, preparing challenges based on humanitarian goals, so it was really good to hear which of the UN goals people were most fired up about and that also helped people form teams. One woman said she was a UX designer and could do great pitch decks. And since I was building the event repository, I told everyone about my MLIS degree and offered to help with research or datasets.

If you are an experienced Hackathon attendee, say so. If you aren’t, tell everyone what got you there. Some hackathons can be really serious, but even so, I’ve always find them a lot of fun. Enjoy.