Just solving a problem might not be enough

Posted on November 09, 2020

This weekend I have had participated in a hackathon. Although it was not my first hackathon, and I did not win, I found the experience very worthwhile.

Together with my colleague, we implemented a small mobile application that focused on helping people make better, more informed choices regarding the products they buy. We used a really powerful NLP model to come up with answers to the following questions:

• is a given product environment friendly,
• how it can affect my health in a long run,
• what are the alternatives.

Additionally, we provided a way to compare two products concerning these questions. And the results were superb, check the response for environmental concerns for beef.

"The Major environmental impacts of rearing cattle are the productions of methane and carbon dioxide, as well as nitrous oxide. These greenhouse gases (GHGs) contribute to global warming. Carbon dioxide, in particular, is believed to contribute to climate change, acid rain, and ocean acidification. It may also affect agriculture by reducing the uptake of nitrate by plants. The key drivers of emissions are arguably the feed and the method of rearing cattle. ... "

This is just part of it but you get the idea. To me it is great, I don't need to spend my time doing all the research myself when going groceries. I would have all information inside my pocket, on-demand.

So what was the problem? What other did that put them ahead? When I looked at the projects that win, to me it was obvious. I believe it was three things. It all came down to presentation, UI/UX, and accessibility. While we focused on the implementation, we left ourselves little time for preparing the pitch presentation. It was just a two-minute video of me talking to the camera. While it wasn't super bad there was like no music, no graphics, or banners that would help the recipient grasp the idea. It was a huge mistake I believe. After contemplating it for a moment, I think that our video, without any visual hints, felt too abstract. As for UI/UX, you can imagine what two back-end programmers' destiny was in that regard (check screen on the bottom of the page). When I looked at the project done by the winners, I was astonished by how slick everything looked. And the last part regarding accessibility. Due to some technical difficulties, we provided users with just the ".apk" file, which is not ideal since people then need to download it to their phones, install it manually, and accept all the warnings raised by the system. This is much worse than the usual way of getting the application from "Play Store". If users cannot access your application in a fast and simple way, they're not even going to bother trying.

As I mentioned in the title, having an idea that solves a real-world problem, and even implementing it properly, might not be enough to succeed.

Anyway, I had learned a lot. Not only what I have already mentioned but I also picked up Dart and Flutter. In not even two days, knowing nothing about them I built a fully usable application prototype. I feel that I could now understand even other codebases based on those technologies. Hackathons are a nice way to quickly learn something, truly.