There is a constant debate in the hackathon community about whether the design of the presentation that the teams present to the jury members at the final pitch of the product matters. From November 20 to 22, the participants of our pre-acceleration program will have to present their projects. We thought about what role a beautiful presentation plays in this performance and how to make a candy out of it, at least at the minimum. To understand this, we turned to the participants of the final stage of the competition. In this post, they will share their experience of working on hackathons with and without a designer, as well as give a few life hacks on how to make a real candy out of a presentation with a minimum set of ingredients.
Do you really need designers on your team?
In fact, the answer to this question lies in the specifics of the event and how much time the teams are given to prepare the presentation. If we are talking about hackathons, then some of them last 36 hours, and some - 48. Agree that in the second case everything is much simpler, because the extra hours will not hurt anyone (and you will have time to make an excellent presentation with a stylish design) . Hackathons that are more about “coding” do not require any effort from the designer at all – teams just need to use classic Power Point and Keynote templates.
At Digital Breakthrough, we initially formulated the main message that we want to see multidisciplinary teams, where there are all roles - developers, designers, managers and marketers. This helps to work out the project from different angles, bringing it closer to a commercially perfect one. However, during the final, many participants said that it is not easy to be able to design in 48 hours and it does not matter at all whether there is a designer or not.
Teams will have much more time to prepare presentations for the final defense after the pre-acceleration program, so they can literally “smear themselves” with tools for designing a really good presentation.
Alexander Streltsov, co-founder of 152fz.rf, team captain True Crime: “A hackathon designer can either be absent or present. It is possible to draw on one idea and white slides with the main thoughts. In the past, I had experience presenting projects to investors and receiving investments. For them, design is less important. For a hackathon it might be different. You can also surprise the jury with a beautiful presentation, as this serves as an evaluation criterion.”
Artem Pokrasenko, team member "Crutches and Bicycles" believes that designers are a must for any team: “There's an old joke that one of the problems with product development is that customers don't use it (the product) the way the developer intended. The designer, and also if he or she understands UX, helps to bring to a common denominator how the product is used and what it was designed for. Well, purely subjective - we love a beautiful product more.
According to Artem, designers are definitely needed and there are many arguments “for”:
First, the Your presentation should stand out from the rest. For example, at the beginning you are talking about a certain Petya or a legally registered group, Petya, who have some kind of problem that greatly complicates their life. Then they suddenly find out that there is your product that can solve it. Thus, in a simple way, you show the main idea of the project, point out the problem that it solves and show the satisfied face of Petya. Ease of execution is often the key to success.
Second, the the designer is very unloading frontend developers. If there is a design, then they only have to make up and connect with the background, and not invent what and where should be. By the way, at hackathons that are purely about coding, it is better to have another good fullstack programmer (according to experience).
Vladislav Sirenko, team member Forevo Labs sure it all depends on the goal of the team. If it sounds like: “We just want to make the development and make it work”, then the designer is not needed. If the goal is: “We want to make a full-fledged product in the allotted time,” then the answer is obvious. Design (as well as development) is a full-fledged part of a full-fledged product. Moreover, design is what the user interacts with in terms of UX. So the success of the product depends on it.
Imagine: you are at a hackathon, there are a lot of teams with top designers around. You don't have it
Where do you immediately run for help? Are there any resources where you can get inspired, steal pictures (don't offer Shutterstock), ready-made guidelines/designs?
Hackathons often go without a designer — team True Crime just one of those. According to the participants, spending time on rendering a presentation in a short time is not very effective. It makes sense to think over its logical structure and present your project concisely - this will help to consistently reveal the most necessary information for the jury.
The Digital Breakthrough team does not recommend going to hackathons without a designer, but the madness of the brave, as they say... We asked the guys from True Crime to recommend resources that help them cope without a designer - save the links!
Alexander Streltsov: “The design template itself can be searched on the Internet, but it will take time to choose and adapt to your theme. Therefore, I will advise several resources where you can get free icons and images (in some cases with attribution).”
Without photo stocks, of course, nowhere. One of the most adequate - free stock . There photos come across beautiful and high-quality and it is not at all a shame to use them in presentations.
Icons True Crime always takes from three sites:
- . The motto of this resource is "Icons for everything". And, perhaps, there really can be found something suitable for any design.
- - there is also an incredibly large selection of different icons.
- - a huge collection of high-quality graphics.
Also, it is always useful to follow modern trends in design - platforms will help you with this. и , where daily design contests are held and user works are posted.
Team member Mood In Mute Alexander Tseluiko in cases where you need to do something without a designer, uses the program . In it, you can write business algorithms, design screens / pages, write out on which screens what information and valid actions should be. It does all this either on the basis of material (angular material, quasar, vuetify, etc.), while looking for pictures on google in parallel. In extreme cases, he uses Photoshop or Blur and "finishes" the colors so that the pictures fit into the general material style and the selected color palette.
The result is several pages with the thrown components of one of the libraries listed above, at this moment Alexander revises the interface to reduce clicks: “This is an opportunity to make at least an average design, and not a lime-purple horror with bright red font on a bright blue background. It’s not worth trying to become a designer and give birth to something beautiful as part of a hackathon - often in such cases only the author will like the brainchild”Alexander comments.
You will say: why a designer, if there are templates in Power Point. Maybe there are tricks to work in obvious presentation designers, a la PP or Keynote?
All people who have ever taken part in a hackathon have a certain set of cheating techniques that help them not only quickly and tastefully present a project, but also show off to the jury members with a concise presentation and a fresh presentation of an idea.
According to Alexandra Streltsova , the fastest and most convenient presentation tool is Google slides. It is enough just to have some sense of taste recognized by colleagues and follow the style of your template. At the same time, it is not at all necessary to be a designer and work miracles - innovations have already done everything for you
Alexander Tseluiko believes that the most important thing is to work not on the design, but on the logical structure of the presentation. And here no templates will certainly help you. An interesting trick that the team uses is that they try to “predict” the questions from the jury members and visualize the answers to them in advance in the presentation. It is important to understand that among the experts, everyone is interested in some separate parts of the project, so it will be right if you scatter certain aspects of the prototype on different slides. For example, one judge will be more interested in the architecture of the project, the other - the estimate for it. During the main pitch, these slides will not be shown, but when the jury starts asking questions, you will be fully equipped and will be able to visually demonstrate everything.
Does it make sense to say that you can win hackathons with a zero idea, but with a beautiful presentation?
We often heard the opinion that at hackathons no one gives a damn about an idea if its visualization is lame. I agree with this Alexander Streltsov, which emphasizes that a beautiful visualization, combined with a correctly presented idea, reasonable value, and preliminary responses to possible criticism, is a priori a claim to victory.
Alexander Tseluiko believes that everything depends on the hackathon itself. Speaking specifically about the Digital Breakthrough, the regional stage showed that a beautiful presentation, coupled with a good speaker, is valued much higher than having a unique but poorly presented idea.
Let's say there are two commands:
First developed and demonstrated a unique encryption, but at the time of the presentation, all participants began to stutter, forget words, etc.
And there is second a team that simply introduced their company and talked about their capabilities and how they worked on the task. However, they do not offer any solution. But their presentation is listened to in one breath, and experienced managers communicated closely with the organizers, judges and experts throughout the hackathon.
So, the second team wins.
Artem Pokrasenko: “A provocative question, the answer to which primarily depends on the panel of judges. Depending on what goals the organizers set for themselves and what they want to achieve. With a beautiful presentation, I think you won’t be able to win, but a well-developed architecture and project design is sometimes more important than written code. The code can always be added, but on square wheels you won’t get far.”
Write in the comments what life hacks of beautiful presentations you have. Do you need a designer for a sweet, expensive and eye-catching presentation?
Source: habr.com