What is Hackathon at Inspectorio?
While working at Inspectorio, I had the opportunity to join an internal competition - Hackathon. The competition is to find out which team has the best idea to innovate the company’s offerings:
“The Inspectorio Hackathon 2023 aims to connect all Inspectorians with the creativity, design, and proving of innovative ideas that present new opportunities for our business, solve our clients' pain points, and overall push our business forward.
We will break departmental and functional boundaries to leverage different skill sets and knowledge to create more comprehensive and informed solutions, aspiring to identify strategic opportunities for innovation in our domain!”
First, we needed to team up with 3-4 people. We only had 3 working days to do all the research - ideation - development - and presentation. During this period, we could consult with mentors from different departments in the company.
The evaluation would be based on:
- Business Value: the idea has market value or supports a solution that does
- Original/Impactful: the wow effect, due to its creative and out-of-the-box thinking
- Realistic: the idea is easy or possible to bring to fruition
- Autonomy: following the company values, the execution of the idea is an act of an independent team. But a key factor in good decision-making is reaching out for guidance from experts; therefore reaching out to our panel of Mentors is a crucial factor in the evaluation
With no further ado, let’s see how I became the Champion in the Hackathon!
The Project - Spotlight Search
Below is the information that our team gathered during the competition.
How did I find the idea?
I looked at Microsoft Clarity on all Inspectorio Products and found that
- Searching is consistently one of the most used features by the user
- The top pages accessed by the users are the ones that are full with information (hundreds of rows)
- The screen recording shows that the users open multiple pages and copy/paste data manually
I also looked at the User Flow/Funnel on MixPanel and can confirm the same behavior
Due to time constraints, we could not interview the users to validate this hypothesis. However, based on:
- Our experience talking to new users (who have used our product for not so long)
- The fact that Sight has 100+ unique URLs. On one page, it even has many tabs/sections
- The fact that different clients use different terminologies
➔ We hypothesize that finding a configuration menu is not an easy task. Opening the right page on the first click could even be harder.
User pain points
From the above analysis, we could see the following pain points:
- The user needs a fast – simple way to find information (inspection, PO,…)
- The user struggles to navigate because of the complexity of the menu/page structure and the differences in terminologies
- The user has a limited ability to explore the whole Inspectorio platform as well as leverage the platform's advantages
How the market is solving it?
The most popular example is the MacBook's Spotlight search. For those who do know, we can search literally anything on this: internal files, photos, text in a photo, apps, google search,… You can also do some matches or currency conversions.
You can also see it in Arc (an emerging browser based on Chrome), which has the same concept as the Spotlight search
Jira & Confluence recently joined the trend
Our solution - Spotlight Search
It would be a Search engine that allows the user of Inspectorio to find anything, including the pages on the platform, the entities created by the users, and multiple other things that could be added. And we call it "Spotlight Search".
Due to the time constraint, we limited the scope of our ideation/investigation to mainly on 1 product.
Feature Ideation
I did a deeper investigation & ideation on the possible functionalities of this and came up with the list below (some parts are removed due to confidentiality issues). All the functionalities are built based on the user’s needs/pain points.
The MVP was selected based on a few criteria:
- How popular/important the feature is to the user (our assumption only – due to the time constraint)
- How simple it is to implement (we only have 3 days)
We also came up with a Roadmap for the development:
We also drew a simple user flow (because we aim to simplify the user's journey!)
I also want to highlight that with the vision of the company to have a unified product suite – one platform for all, the Spotlight search functionality can:
- Be reused as a common module on all products
- Bridge the gap among products, allowing the user to seamlessly find data/info across products
Designing the feature
Because there was no designer on the team, I took that part. Below is the Figma design that I did:
Technical design
Spotlight service is designed as a centralized standalone (non-business related) service, which means any service/product that has searchable items can use it (e.g. Rise, Docuflow, …).
- Reusable: As Inspectorio embraces the one-platform vision, Spotlight service is designed to be a native component that can be used in any framework/product
- Scalable: it is designed to be horizontally scalable to handle increased traffic and data volumes (already using scalable services e.g. Elasticsearch and Kafka)
- Extensible: it is extensible so that new features and functionality can be added easily.
Below is the Component Diagram of how the Backend works:
We also created internal APIs that other Inspectorio’s Product can use:
So, what was the result?
We prepared a presentation and shared it with the whole company. You can find the slides here (some part are removed due to security reasons)
I am the only member of the Product team, so I luckily had a chance to represent the team and share it with the judges & audience. After that, we had an internal poll and got 50% of all votes! Of course, at that moment, we became the Champion of the Hackathon 2023.
