Reaching New Communities
Overview
XD Throwdown is a one-night event design competition for teams to compete head-to-head by problem-solving live to benefit a local organization and its mission.
Role
Role: UX Designer
Team: 5 UX Design Professionals (The Skeleton Crew)
Scope: 1-night event (Oct. 13th, 2022)
Constraints: Analog materials (post-its, whiteboards, etc.)
Challenge
My objective along with my team and other participating designers is to determine how we can best support the local organization. For participants, the event began 2 weeks in advance however, only on the night of the event is when the problem would be revealed.
The challenge for the night was ideating potential solutions for “How Might We Attract New Communities to Our Mission?” within two 35-minute halves. Plus, ideating as a newcomer in design for an audience and a panel of 3 judges within a loud event space, using analog tools, and keeping up with senior designers.
Results
Research conducted before and during the event by interviewing audience members and the stakeholders established a foundation full of care and empathy. My team & I provided a solution rooted in authentic engagement with local businesses by creating a yearly bar crawl event, collaborating with retail stores to allow brand ambassadors, and my idea of a job board to post volunteer work based on the need to combat current donor fatigue. Our team won the design competition by gathering support from the judges, the audience, and the non-profit. As a part of the winning team, I will work with Friends to bring my team’s solution to life.
The following project is currently in progress, but I will be blogging throughout the project for insights and updates.
Feb. 9th, 2023
Since the night of the event, October 13th, we’ve only met twice given all parties have been occupied with their full-time commitments. The night of the event our team pitched 3 different solutions, and since our meetings, we have geared toward delivering one of those solutions: a bar crawl. The crawl seems most feasible given the time, resources, and experience that Friends has since they’ve participated in crawls before. However, not much progress has been made while we wait for a third-party vendor to help Friends conduct an audience study.
The plan now is to wait for the third-party vendor to conduct this study to provide us with all the data, metrics, and target audience to help develop our roadmap.
My role in the project has been developing a style guide for the bar crawl alongside another designer. This means ideating a theme, typefaces, and imagery to help market ourselves to partners, collaborators, and sponsors. After all, we do need some additional money to get this going!
I’ll provide a small preview of the FigJam file next to this post where I made my contributions toward ideating for potential themes. I started off reviewing bar crawls around the area as well as nationally, determining what makes them unique, using that to ideate potential crawls for our project, and what that crawl may look like.
The next item moving forward is working with my partner and mentor overseeing the style guide development to ensure what we have is solid before we present it to the rest of the team. I’m feeling pretty good about this project because this can be a really fun event for the city while benefiting a great cause. Who knows, maybe this can be the event of the summer. Move over July 4th, you have a new king in town! 😂