CODE THE CHANGE · SPRING 2026
Management for Canada’s biggest charity hackathon
ROLE
Lead product designer
TEAM
2 designers
5 developers
2 tech leads
TIMELINE
1 month
SKILLS
Product design
UX research
AI prototyping
OVERVIEW
I led a complete redesign of a hackathon management system in 1 month!
Every year, my club hosts Hack the Change, Canada’s biggest charity hackathon. We use a portal for participants, judges, and club admin during the event.
I identified key issues with the previous portal, and redesigned the system to better communicate event status to users, reducing user confusion.
IMPACT
41%
Increased participant understanding during onboarding.
Based on user testing
35%
Perceived improvement in navigation clarity.
Based on user testing
BACKGROUND
40%+ of participants publicly posted confusion about event status last year.
Two years ago, we started using a portal to coordinate participants, judges, and club admin during the event. While using the tool, we received many questions and comments about the event and the system, which I aimed to address via a system redesign.
THE PROBLEM
After using the portal for 2 years, admins, judges, and participants all found it confusing.
KEY POINTS
01
Onboarding after signup was unclear
02
Team status was ambiguous
03
Nobody knew where to find things
04
Inconsistent visual design
PROBLEM STATEMENT
How do we ensure participants always know what is happening to reduce confusion?
SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS
A portal that answers questions before participants ask.
A web-app that lets Hack the Change participants to easily form teams and find real-time event information, while allowing event organizers to easily keep track of participants.
CORE FLOWS
The most important information, all in one place.
Event status, upcoming schedule, and deadlines in one place, updating across every phase of the event so participants always know what is going on.
Guided onboarding, customized to each participant.
Three paths based on your team situation, instead of one dense instructions screen so users know exactly how to participate.
Clearly communicating scores and round statuses.
Every team sees what stage of the event they made it to, regardless of whether they advanced or not, removing guesswork.
RESEARCH & INSIGHTS
The difficulty of finding information was a major pain point.
I interviewed 8 hackathon event organizers, reviewed feedback from 60+ participants, and 8 judges to understand their goals and pain points experienced during the event. I also did a complete audit of the existing tool using a heuristic analysis.
WHAT I LEARNED
“Did anyone make it to round 2 yet?”
- 30+ participants
Judging status was too ambiguous → Only successful teams knew if they passed a round, leaving others guessing.
“I didn’t know about [the minigame] until after… I would have loved to participate”
- P2
Event schedule was unclear → Many people didn’t know about the fun events we were hosting
“The tool is confusing right from the signup”
- event organizer
Confusion right from onboarding → Participants were confused on how to form and register teams on their own.
“It took me 3 minutes just to find the Zoom Link!”
- P1
Navigation didn’t fit users’ mental models → it was difficult to quickly find information as many things were in unexpected locations.
KEY DECISIONS
Addressing key pain points
I researched, designed, and created working prototypes with AI, user tested with 7 participants, and iterated at each stage.
01
Creating new homes for old information with card sorting.
Based on user research, I realized that many participants couldn’t quickly find the information they were looking for. I then conducted an open card sort to discover intuitive groupings for the information we needed to display.
02
Indicating critical event status markers on the dashboard.
I initially redesigned the participant dashboard attempting to prioritize hierarchy, ease of access, and visual consistency. After a design critique, I realized I was repeating too much information and overloading the screen, so I only included the items participants struggled to find the most.
03
Creating a dedicated space for judging information.
One of the biggest struggles during the hackathon was judging and addressing intense volumes of confused participants, so I created a dedicated page to house judging information so participants would always know where they stand at any point.
04
Reducing cognitive overload in the onboarding process.
I hypothesized that the onboarding process was confusing starting from the team creation screen because the original team creation screen was dense, and because users couldn’t understand how teams worked in the system. I redesigned team creation in onboarding to have 3 clear paths to help users understand how team creation works.
THE FINAL PRODUCT
Beyond the participant portal
I worked on many aspects of this system as a whole. If you’re interested in learning more, please reach out to me!
VALIDATION & IMPACT
If the redesign works, participants won’t have to ask
I tested my designs with these metrics to measure success:
Onboarding smoothness
If participants sign up without hesitating, the three paths are doing their job.
41% perceived better understanding
Information retrieval
If participants find scores, the schedule, and meal tickets without help, the new structure matches how they think.
35% perceived clearer navigation
Discord questions
If “did anyone make it to round 2?” stops showing up in Discord, status is finally clear.
Measured at the next event
REFLECTION
What I learned
I learned a ton coming out of this massive multi-step project and I'm excited to grow from here!
Research design is critical.
Research results are easily influenced by design elements like phrasing. Being mindful of research design helps ensure proper results.
Think holistically.
Designing each part of the system required careful consideration of how some design choices changed other parts of the system.
