ByDesign

A new way for teams to interact online with design thinking and the user at the center. The platform would work as the Kahoot of online meetings, taking teams through a session of built-in innovation.

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Inspiration

Last year, I read this book called, “The Design Thinking Playbook”, and it became clear that Design Thinking is the future of business. Design Thinking is about approaching things differently with a strong user orientation and fast iterations with multidisciplinary teams. Design Thinking inspires radical innovation and it's clear that Design Thinking is the driving force behind those who will lead industries through transformations and evolutions of our technologies. With the shift to a virtual working environment, it's important that we provide teams the tools they need to be innovative and solve the complex challenges at hand.

What it does

Somehow, the project and meetings tools we have available aren’t really catered towards this radical redesign in the way we approach innovation. I’ve created ByDesign, a portal that will take a team through a series of steps designed to make them ideate with a user-centric focus. Upon completion, the team will come out with an idea that directly targets.

Not only do many meetings lack structure, with teams having a circular conversation trying to come up with an innovative idea or approach to a problem. Teams will often use sticky notes and whiteboards and come out with no clear task accomplished.

WIth the ByDesign platform, each team member will join a generated session using a uniquely generated code. Upon entering, the team will be taken through a series of steps by the platform, starting with defining the user and her challenges. They will soon go through an ideation challenge to solve those challenges, and the team member's top voted ideas will be combined. By the end of the session, the team should come out with a clear idea, user knowledge, and action plan.

How I built it

I used React to develop a fully functional web-app. Next, I deployed my web app to the cloud directly from GitHub with Azure Static Web Apps. I then create a simple backend API with the help of Azure Functions. I also wanted to incorporate some machine learning into the final product which would look at the title of the final idea and attempt to generate similar ideas or existing products for the team to compare.

Challenges I ran into

My main challenge was creating custom 3D avatars based on the user specification. I think this would be an incredible feature that would allow teams to really visualize their customer. However, I ended up having to plan to develop this in more detail for the future because the complexity of creating a fully-custom animated human-model in React turned out to be vast, with little existing APIs and ways of doing this.

Custom user creation

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am very proud of the fact that my web-app is fully functional, so any user or team can go in and start a session to start ideating. Creating an app with so many pieces and moving-parts was a difficult task to accomplish in such a short period of time, but definitely very rewarding.

What I learned

I've learned a ton about using React and deploying apps to the cloud. This project was very technically heavy with so many interacting parts in the app. Things like navigation were very non-typical and forced me to create unique technical solutions.

What's next for ByDesign

My long term vision for this project is to develop a new way for teams to interact online. They can utilize a portal experience for more than ideation, such as for prototyping and testing. By continuing to develop each feature and ensure incredible user experience, I hope to eventually create many portals, for things like ideating, prototyping, testing, and more. Teams would no longer need to rely on clunky meeting agendas or conversations that don't lead to a clear outcome. Instead, their very platform will drive them through a series of tasks that create innovation and clear user-centered output.

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