Winning “Best Application Award” at the Hackathon

Some of the greatest products are made from the unlikely combination of two seemingly disparate fields. Velcro and dynamite, though they might be considered more “accidental discoveries” than anything, highlight how innovation can come about when cross-pollinating ideas. When I was at IDEO, considered one of the world’s most innovative design companies in the world, I came to acribe to their “human-centered design” method to solving problems. Applying this philosophy to how I approach business, design, and even academics has been one of my most empowering ideologies.

Last week I had the opportunity to be part of an amazing experience – the 2012 PennApps Hackathon, self-proclaimed as the largest student-run hackathon in the nation, and with over 140 entrants and news outlets like TechCrunch and Wired covering the event, just being able to witness the event unfold was really inspiring (though mostly filled with sleep-deprived face-palming and non-stop working).

What is a hackathon? If you’re not a programmer, you might be inclined to recall that scene from The Social Network where a bunch of nerds engineers drink booze and code all night long for glory and honor! Well, not totally off the mark. At its most basic level, a hackathon is an event where programmers collaboratively build programs or application within a specific period of time to encourage innovation, fun, and networking. The PennApps Hackathon is a 48-hour hackathon (meaning we only had a paltry two days to make something from scratch) done in teams of up to four people to make an application (not a program).

Ok but first, pause a bit. You might be thinking why I would be involved in a hackathon. Sure, I can do minimal front-end work with PHP, CSS, and HTML. But start asking me to incorporate more advanced coding like jScript and jQuery and you’ve lost me. Admittedly, when I was approached by a friend to be involved in the process I was wondering why ask me to join. In a 48-hour time frame, in which every second counts (and trust me, every second did count, we submitted our code 5 minutes before the deadline), you’d want as much coding resource and expertise as possible.

There is a danger to that mindset though, as my friend reminded me. From his experience, when four programmers get together to make an application, they think the same way, their strengths are multiplied but so are their weaknesses. And oftentimes they just mash functions and APIs to make what they think is interesting from a technical standpoint, but from a user point of view is a Frankenstein-like product with poor user experience and design. Why I was asked to participate in a hackathon was not to be a programmer, but to give a unique design direction and shape product development from a user experience perspective. (Which harkens us back to the philosophy of “human-centered design” and the need for cross-pollination of fields.)

Ultimately, we created a drink discovery application for the Android phone that lets you discover mixed drinks through fun experimentation. You can check out the site we made (it’s on Tumblr since Tumblr was a sponsor for the competition) here and hopefully it will be available to download one day! The application won the Best Mobile Application Award, which was amazingly humbling and exciting for our team. Everything from the user interface (UI), graphics, mock ads, site, and even wording are part of a cohesive aesthetic direction (I opted for a more playful 1960′s cocktail era feel). This is important because the application’s front-end design is critical to user perception of the application and even a small inconsistency in this can absolutely ruin everything (branding operates in a similar way). The user experience was designed around optimizing ease of use and intuitive functionality that doesn’t require any explanation to use while still offering a robust and powerful experience for users. In other words, we took a cue from Apple and tried to make the application as simple to use as possible – minimal user pathways while still providing powerful functionality. For us, this meant the user being able to consistently discover new drinks and being able to share new recipes and ideas with friends.

Fashion & Digital: A Rocky Marriage

Creating a mobile application for this hackathon made me wonder why we didn’t see more mobile applications in the fashion arena. It isn’t all too surprising though, fashion has been notoriously bad at integrating technology. Social media and fashion makes so much sense from a content distribution perspective and even from a sales perspective, yet brands have been woefully slow at capitalizing on the trend. Even worse were brands trying to fight against the digital transformation and magazines seeing social media as an “us vs. them” situation when in reality it should have been a question of how to integrate the digital into the analog world of print.

Mobile (smartphone) is one of the fastest growing sub-sectors of the digital era. The mobile market is one of the fastest in the world, with its growth even surprising Google, with 42% of consumers already owning smartphones and 84% of those users actively use their phone while shopping in-store (Deloitte’s 2011 Holiday Survey). The Mobile World Congress provides these additional statistics that should give us all pause:

1. Smart phone sales are projected to exceed global PC sales by 2014
2. Mobile search and web use is growing 8x faster than the equivalent point 10 yrs ago for computers
3. Half of new online connections are from mobile devices

Questioning the recent L2 report published on Mobile IQ for prestige brands, Marketing VOX noted that despite the celebration of successful case examples in the industry, there is an overall underinvestment in the mobile sphere from luxury/fashion brands:

The IQ distribution reveals a significant, widespread underinvestment in mobile, as nearly half the brands were designated as feeble. The report found that only two-thirds of prestige brands maintain a mobile-optimized site, and one-third of these mobile development efforts do not yet support commerce. Also, while 70% of brands have mobile apps, fewer than 20% of brands have created unique app content for tablet devices such as the iPad, which register high usage among affluent consumers.

There is a huge market opportunity in digital for fashion, and within digital, the lowest hanging fruit is clearly mobile. Especially with the boom in tablet devices, fashion brands should be strongly considering how to integrate their marketing and even sales operations with their mobile strategy. But of course, you need a mobile strategy to begin with (something I fear some brands don’t even have yet).

Remember my philosophy of cross-pollination innovation? Fashion and mobile is an area ripe for this kind of innovation. Human-centered design in fashion might seem strange, given that fashion has historically been a form of art-centered design; but in the right context, an anthropological approach to fashion lets us think critically about how people can interact with fashion through the mobile and digital medium. This mindset will enable designers and retailers to create powerful new ways for fashion brands to create a new revenue stream, gain brand exposure, and engage with consumers in a fundamentally new and powerful way.