My first hackathon, on a whim.
Kind of on a whim, I signed up for my first ever hackathon—Protothon 2026, a UX hackathon focused on prototyping and design thinking rather than actually coding and building. I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone and try something new.
Of the prompts given to us, I felt most drawn to the Mental Well Being track, which challenged us to:
Starting at 12 PM on May 2, I had 27.5 hours until 3:30 PM the next day to design the product and create a slide deck. I completed the project solo over the course of the hackathon.
Connection at scale keeps breaking.
People want to connect honestly with other humans, but every existing tool either lacks scale, enables toxicity, or rewards performance over presence.
We are lonelier than ever, yet the tools built to fix it have made things worse. Social media rewards performance over honesty. Likes, follower counts, and comment sections turn sharing into competition.
How might wecreate a space where strangers feel safe enough to be honest and present enough to truly feel each other’s stories?
Listening before designing.
Competitive analysis
I studied five existing projects—Humans of New York, The Strangers Project, Meet Cutes NYC, Letters to Strangers, and Hunter Prosper’s Stories from a Stranger. All proved that honest human stories create genuine empathy. All were limited by geography and a single organizer.
I also examined why Yik Yak and Whisper failed—both gave people anonymity with no design accountability and became toxic at scale. The lesson: safety has to be built in from the start, not moderated after the fact.
White paper research
I read through Brandon Stanton’s Reddit AMA to understand why strangers open up to each other, and reviewed r/confession and r/HumansBeingBros to observe how people share vulnerably in low-stakes environments.
I also read into the psychology of storytelling and empathy, more specifically how engaging with another person’s story draws us out of our own circumstances and into theirs, making connection feel genuinely felt rather than performed. This validated the decision to design a slow, immersive reading experience over one optimized for engagement.
Three observations that shaped the design.
Clustering the research into an affinity map produced six groups: safety and toxicity, engagement and reactions, discovery and browsing, sharing and expression, atmosphere and brand, and precedents and insights. Three observations emerged that directly shaped the design:
- Existing tools and projects fail at either scale, safety, or honesty. No one has gotten all three at once.
- We talk to more people than ever, yet we feel known by fewer. Volume of connection has decoupled from depth of it.
- People aren’t short of stories. They’re short of a way in. The friction is access, not material.
Sketching the shape.
I began by sketching the core moments of the experience — onboarding, story discovery, the act of writing, and the moment of receiving someone else’s story — to find where the design could carry the warmth the brief asked for.
A first look at the solutions.
Three pillars guided the design: intentional discovery, guided prompts, and a different kind of reaction. See the full set further down in Final Designs ↓.
Intentional Discovery
- Before surfacing any stories, the app asks what brought you here and what kind of story resonates with you right now.
- Stories are matched to your emotional state, creating discovery that feels like finding something rather than being fed something.
Guided Prompts
- A new shared prompt every week, gone in 48 hours. It gives people more bravery to be honest.
- Whether you need a prompt, a first sentence, or just a blank page, there’s an entry point designed for how you’re feeling right now.
A Different Kind of Reaction
- No comments. No likes. No follower counts.
- A long hold tells a writer that someone stayed.
- For those who want to say a little more—pre-set phrases only, never free text.
The final designs.
What the judges said.
What worked
- Onboarding to help select what kind of stories you want to read.
- Not limited to journaling-type content—inspiring stories are welcome too.
- Guidance for writing stories: prompt, starting line, or empty page.
- The reaction model — “being present” as a response to stories.
Improvements
- UI could have a little more polish.
- User journey could have been grounded in one or two specific users’ pain points.
Looking back & ahead.
Despite pulling an all-nighter, I'm thoroughly glad I did. I had always been hesitant about hackathons, so entering one and committing fully to it felt like an important milestone for me as a designer.
Looking at the winning projects and the feedback I received, I wish I had pushed myself more creatively, both in UI and in my interpretation of the prompt. I took it quite literally rather than making it more distinctly my own. I also wish I had gone deeper on one core flow rather than spreading my attention across multiple features.
I'd love to revisit this project someday—with more time, I'd tighten the core experience, explore the visual identity further, and design the flows I had to leave for V2.