Company
Emrals

Time
May 2014

Role
UX/UI Design

Category
Mobile App/Service Design

Problem

There's a trash crisis in US. Recycyling is inefficient and landfill can not keep up with America's wasteful habit. Each year US generates 1.3 billion tones of waste and that is expected to grow more than 4 billion tones by 2100. The waste brings all sorts of environmental and economical issues which desperately needs solutions on multiple angles.

Process

In May 2014, I joined TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. I didn't have any ideas that I wanted to work on so I walked around the auditorium full of techies and started to shop around teams to join. There was one table that had three engineers and they were looking for a designer for collaboration.

One guy explained the idea. He mentioned, "I want to build a platform where people can mine cryptocurrency by cleaning up the city." I thought the concept was interesting because it deals with behavioral change that benefits both city and people. I joined the team and we started to build working demo in 24 hours.

Result

We built the working demo in 24 hours and presented it in front of hundreds of nerds the day after. I didn't get any sleep because there was no clear ux and I had to design everything from the scratch. I worked closely with iOS engineer and gave him direction on implementation. Two other engineers were working on the backend simultaenously.

In result, our idea was a runner up for UX Design Award out of over 50 teams. It was intense and rewarding experience. In addtion, after hackathon, I gave more consultation and collaborated with the founder for few more hackathons through out the year.