Hack Your Portfolio 2024: NetWorker

Hack Your Portfolio 2024 Submission: NetWorker. Based on the prompt: Something to help others find a job/Something for our Portfolios. See our submission here.

UX/UI: Duffy Austin and Jensen Liu

BACKEND: Angelina Li and Analucia Macias Marin

FRONTEND: Riky Rivera

This was my first project outside of my UX bootcamp with General Assembly, which ended in June 2024. I teamed up with a group primarily made up of fellow first-timers, but led everyone in discussion due to my recent experience working on team projects as part of the bootcamp.

To start, we looked at our prompt for the hackathon: Something to help others find a job/Something for our Portfolios and leaned into the job-finding aspect. Through discussion of painpoints with current networking tools like LinkedIn and ADP list, and taking inspiration from dating apps like Tinder, we came up with the idea for a low-text website that allowed users to seek out mentors or mentees, or just generally network through setting up individual meetings or larger meetups. We called this website NetWorker: a website that gave users the professional networking environment of something like LinkedIn, but with the more visual-based setup of a dating app or website.

Time was a major factor, so we got to work on the website map and user flow, plotting out what tasks the user would need to accomplish in order to join the site, set up their profile, search for mentors/mentees/general individuals and groups, and reach out to them for a meeting either online or in person.

Priority was put on a toggle that would filter the search results based on whether the user set it to search for just mentors, mentees, or general people. In their profile, the user could tag themselves as a mentor, so they could search for anyone while still showing up as a mentor in the results of other users.

This helped the backend team begin planning how they would organize profiles and search functions for NetWorker. For the front end, Jensen and I got to work sketching the pages themselves.

My sketches for the homepage, the search page, and the scheduling menu

Due to the short timeline of only two days, we didn't have the ability to create high-fidelity mockups of the site, but Jensen and I began work on the assets for the different pages in the meantime.

We put our focus on the home page, the search page and the user profile pages.

The style guide (Jensen created the color pallete), search results page and profile page that I worked on.

We weren't able to implement our assets in the final product, but it was still a good exercise working on a team and exercising our skills in a short timeframe.

This was an experience where I needed to work with a team of people who I never met before and guide them towards creating a viable product. Everyone save for Ricky hadn't worked on a hackathon before, so we were apprehensive to get started. I drew upon my experience working on teams during my bootcamp to initiate discussion and draw up a plan of action for how to tackle the prompt put before us.

As we brainstormed, I impressed that, since we're working remotely, it's important to communicate our feelings and intentions so we're all understood. Oversharing isn't a bad idea in these types of situations because it will give your teammates a better understanding of what you're feeling, and ensure that everyone contributes their ideas to the project.

We unfortunately weren't able to meet the deadline to submit our video to the hackathon, but I encouraged the team to complete it as much as possible as if we had, so that we could have evidence of our work to show.

I want to take my experience from this hackathon with me in my professional career because it taught me the importance of taking initiative and encouraging discussion with my team. I believe that even if the end product in this case wasn't exactly what we'd hoped to make, it still is evidence of our hard work, and shows our process for developing products.