Maintaining the status quo is always an option because It’s safe and we know it works. However, in a time where the tech industry is constantly innovating, we too need to improve and innovate.

Following the pandemic, the eagerness of aspiring coders and designers to participate in hackathons has been higher than ever before.
As a club who has been hosting hackathons since 2014, it is of upmost importance to maintain the quality of our events and continue exceeding our attendee's expectations. This happens in the form of consistently advancing our designs and coming up with solutions that make, not only the hacker experience better, but also better for sponsors, mentors, and volunteers.

After understanding the needs of each core user, we began researching different hackathon and event websites. Each designer was tasked to compile a list and from there, we pointed out the core problems of our existing websites, along with how we could implement improvements.

With the list we compiled, we decided to widen the discussion and bring in the other executive teams to see where they believed that improvements could be made. This included teams like EDI, logistics, sponsorships, marketing, and our developers.

In our meeting with these teams, we were exposed to new perspectives and ideas. We were given resources like Microsoft’s accessibility guidelines and we were able to effectively prioritize the changes we wanted to make, while discussing the scope and feasibility from the implementation side.

With our improved layout in mind, we began designing our first hackathon website of the year, HackCamp.