UX Case Study: Filesoso Mobile App

Story behind the award-winning Hackathon project

The theme of the Upflow Hackathon Competition in 2017 was productivity. During this competition, I led a team to design and implement an app that allows students to collect and store files in the cloud. This article will tell you how we expored the solution through the competition, and why we designed our product in this way. Spoiler alert - my team won the first prize in the end!

Part 1: Inception

Project Background

Over the software project course of 8 weeks, my team designed an app to solve the problem of joining excel files. Then a month later, we took part in the Upflow Hackathon. We redesigned this app in under 24 hours to make a creative product for the contest, which was focused on productivity tools.

My Role:

I was the team leader and product designer.

The other three team members worked on the software development.

For our final presentation, I created an animated prototype to give a pitch for our product.

Problem

Have you imagined a life without Google? What your daily life would be like if you could not access Google Docs? What tools you would use if you needed to collaboratively work on a document with your teammates?

Well, in China, students and employees cannot legally access Google. And there is no good tool for students to share documents or combine Excel files in the cloud.

In my undergraduate school, students usually had to fill in piles of excel files and send them to the class monitor. Then the class monitor would open the Excel files one by one and copy and paste them into a single Excel file. What a time-consuming process…