Introduction

The Team

Me: Product designer 
Adam Stringer: Software Engineer
Guilherme Parpinelli: Backend Developer
Joe Netherton: Data Scientist
Jonghyeon Lee: Junior Data Scientist
Miodrag Opacic: Backend Developer

Defining the idea

My Role

As we are working from home and communicating through tools such as Slack and Google hangouts, it can often be hard to communicate as a group. As a few of us were different nationalities, this can often make it more difficult because of a slight language barrier and not being able to lip read.

To make it easier and make sure everyone could feel comfortably involved I suggested we use FigJam to note down and organise our ideas. This way we are all looking at the same document that the ideas were getting written down on and nothing would get lost in translation. It really helped us to organise our thoughts, along with discussing each team member’s role and making sure we were all clear on what we were doing.

Each day we had a team stand up to talk about what we have worked on and if there were any blockers that another team member could help with.

My role was to create a visual representation for the idea we came up with and put together the UI so we were able to show a basic prototype in the final presentation. The design also helped the rest of the team members stay on the same page in knowing exactly what they should be developing, and also how the frontend should be developed.

The Idea

A platform to allow friends to bet on real life events using Computer Vision.
As Nova Futur is an analytics company and has a sports betting product, we wanted to branch out of just sports and make betting more sociable.

• We wanted to create something different from what Nova Futur usually do.

• We wanted to make a fun game that friends could play together and bet on.

• The idea was to create a game that requires players to race to find random objects in their house.

• The winner is the first player to show the correct item to the camera and be detected by our computer vision algorithm.

• We wanted to make betting social.

Design

The Flow

The Design

Basic Prototype

I created a basic prototype just to show how the flow of the game will work.

Conclusion

This is the first time the company has put together a Hackathon, as a lot of us had been hired during covid and lockdown, lots of us have never met each other in person. This was a really fun experience to end the year, and really brought together team members who don’t work together on a day to day basis.

As we were working from home this can make communication quite difficult as well as being a slight language barrier between us. I tried to make it as easy as possible by creating a space in FigJam, where we can all visually see what is being written down in real time and we all had access to be able to contribute at the same time. This made it more like we were having meetings in person and also allowed for everything to be written down and not misinterpreted (as it can be difficult to hear over google hangouts and multiple people speaking at once). 

It was a great experience to quickly put together a design in a very limited time (2 days), and not have too much time to think about it. It really showed what is possible and how well we worked as a team. Although the design thinking is very rough and not all flows have been thought through, it was a really enjoyable experience and overall very successful.