The Council

Winning Canada’s largest hackathon with an AI-powered advice panel.

In a nutshell...

⭐
An AI-powered panel of funny friends to answer life’s burning questions. Winning project at Hack the North 2023 out of 1000+ hackers.
Team
1 designer + 3 engineers
My Role
UX & Visual Design
Hackathon
Hack the North 2023
Overview
We won Canada’s largest hackathon! In just 36 hours, we put together an MVP of an AI-powered panel to weigh in on your personal problems. After an overwhelming positive reception and feedback, we brought our project to life!
Check out the Council

The Inspiration

We’ve all had sticky situations, embarrassing questions, or sensitive topics. What do you do when the group chat’s not responding, or the question’s too embarrassing to even ask?

Inspired by the software engineer’s rubber duck technique, we built the Council: an AI-powered panel of personalities for witty, wise, and whimsical guidance.

Highlights 🌟

Customize your Council

Choose up to 4 panel members from a variety of ten personalities- ranging from fairly reasonable friend to delusional bestie.

Ask the Council your burning question

Ask the Council anything and everything.

See what the Council has to say about your issue.

Get 4 different perspectives on your problem.

So... how’d we make it?

Before even writing a single line of code, our team sat down and planned out our project.
We had only 36 hours to finish a minimum viable project - it was important to define exactly what we were making, and to not bite off more than we could chew. We started by defining the key user stories for our MVP:
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Asking the Council a question
🖌️
Customizing your Council members
📖
Reading responses and asking followups

The Inspiration

I made quick lo-fi sketches to nail down our key user flows and get early feedback from my teammates. Due to limited time constraints, I jumped pretty quickly into high-fidelity designs to make sure my team had adequate time to build out our UI.

Dev 🤝 Design

Nothing fosters good dev-design collaboration more than just being together for 36 hours straight.

I kept my teammates in the loop throughout my design process to check for feasibility in implementation, and to ensure that we were sticking to the MVP we defined.
I created a quick style guide for my teammates to refer to when building the frontend. We used Chakra UI components as a base to speed up the development process since it was available as a React library and a Figma library.

Our Hackathon Success Story: Winning Hack the North!

While my teammates coded away at an ungodly hour, I went on water bottle refill runs and put together a killer elevator pitch for judging. We only had 3 minutes to present- so I had to keep it concise and hit just the highlights.

Our judges loved our project and we were selected as one of the top 12 winning projects at Hack the North out of 1000+ hackers and 250+ projects! Later that day, I got to present our project in front of the entire Hack the North audience.
Watch our demo at HTN 2023

We actually launched! 🚀

We received a LOT of positive feedback for our project- it’s currently the most popular project on the Hack the North Devpost! So we decided to launch the Council for real. Since we got back from Waterloo, we’ve been meeting after class, late nights, on weekends, to put it together.
🚀
Our goals for launch:
  • Responsive, mobile-friendly website
  • Implementing user accounts and login with Google SSO
🏃🏻
What I did before launch:
  • Mobile screens
  • Additional user flows for sign in
  • Marketing landing page
Our team is putting the finishing touches on the site, but you can check it out live now!
check out the Council

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