Recently, Designlab students were invited to participate in the Adobe XD UX Bootcamp Creative Jam in partnership with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 🚀 Hundreds of UX design bootcamp students participated in this portfolio-worthy creative challenge—including 65 Designlab students!
In total there were 520 registrations from 20 different bootcamp programs across the US, Canada, and UK. 173 portfolio-worthy projects were submitted and only five were selected as winners—two of which were from Designlab students!
Winners were selected by a panel of 13 mentor/educator off-air judges, including three celebrity judges: Krys Blackwood UX at NASA; Jared Spool, UX Educator; and Shannon Slocum, Adobe Product Director.
Participants were tasked with pairing up into teams of two to design a digital experience to solve a NASA-inspired space challenge. Throughout the challenge participants learned new design and prototyping skills, networked with other UX designers, and received constructive feedback from experts.
We’re proud to share that there was great representation from the Designlab community, and ultimately our students dominated the competition! Students from our community took 2nd and 3rd place, as well as two more spots among the top 10.
Check out the winning Designlab teams and their projects...
2nd Place Winner 🥈
Team Eat Pray UX: Benedetto Di Luzio & Jessica Koh (Dwiggins cohort), with their project, “Trivia Raiders”
Congratulations on your 2nd place win, Team Eat Pray UX! We are SO proud of you 😍 Tell us about your award-winning design process of working together on this project.
Having a tight deadline to meet, we found it crucial to work both asynchronously and together. On the day we received the brief, we held a kickoff meeting to get us aligned on the project and define how we’d proceed. We implemented the design sprint method (using Figjam) to quickly iterate and narrow down on the problem, user tasks, personas, and solution features to focus on. We were lucky to find some kids (our target users) who helped us test our wireframes and gave us amazing feedback!
Communication was crucial throughout this process since we worked in two different time zones. While we weren't working together, we used Notion and Google Docs to keep each other informed of what we did. We each worked on different flows for the hi-fi designs. Adobe XD, however, allowed us to collaborate on the same file, so we could always see what the other person was doing. Our daily Zoom calls were indispensable to discuss our decisions and make changes together.
That is some expert cross-timezone collaboration—and it clearly paid off! Tell us about your project, “Trivia Raiders."
The idea behind “Trivia Raiders” is to create a live game and discussion platform in order to make space and STEM topics accessible and not intimidating. We wanted to create an app that fosters learning by doing and this is what makes our solution unique.
We present the learning content after the raid rather than before, to promote learning by sharing together and eliminate any barriers to entry that kids who are intimidated by these topics may feel, while also removing any association with studying and being quizzed that could easily be formed otherwise.
As we were solving the problem of getting kids engaged in space, we realized that the questions in the trivia game were the greatest opportunity to introduce different topics and tear down barriers that might be present in space exploration and in STEM as a whole.
Trivia Raiders sounds like a well-researched and thought-out approach to learning about STEM topics. Maybe one day it will become a reality! What are your biggest takeaways from participating in the Adobe XD NASA Jam?
We highly recommend UX design students take the time to participate in a challenge like this. It really opened our eyes to the fact that the design process is not always linear and you have to adapt to the situation. You also have the opportunity to work on briefs that come from real companies while practicing collaboration skills and time management.
Participating in a design challenge with another teammate was such a valuable experience. You are under so much pressure and it’s great to have the support of a friend as you go through it together. You also get to learn from the different design perspectives and skills of your teammate; it challenges you in ways that go beyond the design challenge itself. You will learn how to design quickly, but you might also learn something new about yourself!
