October 24, 2017 TCO17 Day 2: Recap and UI Design Final 1

The second day of TCO17 was very diverse. We had competitions for all tracks. We started the day with the first final for design, which was then followed by the F2F final, then the Algorithm Competition Semi Final 2 and the day continued with Prototype Competition and the Development Final. It was a full day! Not to forget are that we also had a Design workshop and a Data Science workshop. A lot of excitement around the arena and we had some awesome members who competed in multiple tracks!!
The design final 1 was focused on same problem as the semifinals, but the focus was on the “Phone” experience, as they are they will most likely use this as their primary interaction with the Mentor program. Yesterday’s workshop with the client was of big help to the designers as the improvement was impressive. During the 3 hours, we could see that some of the members had a completely different approach by focusing on the background of the mentors, their work field experience and how to connect with them. Besides this, all of them have improved the branding in terms of background, keeping the logo on most of the pages as well as the colors and style of icons.

In terms of finding out what students like, many designers move from showing just a couple of predefined options as in the specifications to adding a search option for something specific or they started asking what the kids like to do, what kind of music they like, the type of books they read or just adding tags to expand the options of directions/professions they could go.

Many submissions focused on the social aspect as that’s very important for kids that age and there are higher chances of them wanting to connect to a mentor if their friends have already done it. As part of this, they added comment feature, clap or like so it draws their attention more easily.
A couple of finalists went into more details regarding the mentor profile as they put more emphasize on their experience, social skills and added chat features or just ways to connect faster with them. We could also see an improvement in charts as they were shown to show the students progress in their developing, the interests rate or just how popular a career field is.


Overall everyone went and did a great leap over previous round. Later after the finals, the designers had a meeting with the client and some students that will use the application. The live feedback is always valuable, so let’s see how the designers will improve their work tomorrow on the final round!
Lots of excitement for all rounds, as tomorrow is the day when the last competitions will run and the award ceremony will take place. Good luck to all our designers!
Check out the photos as we keep adding them:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/53993064@N03/albums/72157687692385000
https://www.flickr.com/photos/53993064@N03/albums
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