In the professional world, UX research is a process of multiple iterations, data analysis, and broad user bases. The emphasis is on effectiveness, rather than speed. However, in some scenarios, time is a luxury you don’t have.

My example of this is the Michigan State Startup Weekend, where ideas go from pitch to presentation in under two days’ time. Solidifying your idea, planning your finances, prepping your speech, and, crucially, doing your research, happens extremely fast. Typically, we think of speed as a detriment to quality. But on occasions where both of these factors are needed, researchers need to get creative. This experience pushed me to work fast, effectively, and creatively to support my team and landed us in the first place spot. So, how did I do it? Well, it began with three cups of coffee. Then the fun really started.

The idea of MicroWars was pitched by Johan, in the dark grey shirt above, as an educational mobile game focusing on teaching younger audiences concepts of microbiology. Players would collect and battle various organelles and cells against each other in a Pokemon-esque play style, buying more advanced organelles and abilities with ATP, or cell energy, they had saved up. Intrigued, the rest of the team flocked to him to hear more. As it turned out, Johan had previously made a mobile education game, and wanted to expand his business to new ideas. With this expertise, we reviewed our combined skills: we had Finance majors, Graphic Design Majors, Management Majors, and finally myself.

At this point, during my junior year of college, my skills focused heavily on web development and research. Once we realized that we wouldn’t need a website, I was able to focus all of my talents on the research element. This is where I hit my first roadblock – I had been taught how to practice UX research in class but had never done a real-life example. Now, I was the practicing researcher of a startup. On top of this, we wanted to show multiple iterations of our idea and prototype catering to user feedback, meaning I would need to start researching as soon as possible. The first step – as it often is in research – was another cup of coffee.

The First Day

At the very beginning, we had no mockups for our interface. We had our idea, the mechanics of the game, and some educational materials. We had three main audiences we were creating for: first, the obvious user base of students trying to learn more about microbiology. Second, science teachers who would promote the use of the app to their classes as a study aid. Third, school districts to pair with for potential funding and partnerships.

At this early stage, without a prototype or advanced financial plans, I knew we should start with our second audience base of educators. Science teachers could give us raw feedback on our idea and tell us immediately if any aspects of our app were unrealistic for our first audience base of students. At this point, we were about two hours into the challenge, and I had to find out how to contact a science teacher. I contemplated emailing my high school biology teacher, but given that this event occurred during a weekend, the chances of an email reply were low. I needed to find where science teachers spent their weekends, aka their free time, to get the fastest responses possible. A place where niche communities were well organized and active – if you’re a regular internet user, you might know where this is heading.

Among all social media channels, Reddit stands out as a highly organized library of communities. Here, users subscribe to individual Reddits that match their own interests. I paid attention to r/Science and r/ScienceTeachers. r/Science is significantly larger, and would likely get more feedback, but I specifically wanted to reach the educators on r/ScienceTeachers for the most applicable feedback. I posted identical pitches for our idea on both and opened the floor for any questions, comments, or criticisms. Now, as my team began working on mockups and editing our business plan, I used this downtime during educator response gathering to locate our other crucial audience: students.

In a more traditional research setting, finding an audience can look like hiring a company, doing field work, or creating surveys. With only five hours left of our first day, however, my research took the form of calling a childhood friend who had six siblings. I knew one of her sisters was a junior in high school, roughly the age that would be learning the concept of microbiology. Using the bribe of a Starbucks drink, I got my friend to connect me with her sister and four of her sisters friends. This was my guerilla tactic for securing a relevant age range of users for one facet of our audience.

After texting with each of them, I found out their current feelings about science varied widely, from some students confidently saying they were among the top of their class, to others admitting they felt like they lagged behind the others. From the perspective of testing the effectiveness of our app, this was fantastic. It meant we could see how a variety of students interacted with and benefited from our app. However, we didn’t yet have a prototype to show them.

Returning back to Reddit, we got feedback that made us rethink the functioning of our app. Microbiology, we learned, was taught for only about two weeks of the school year, making downloading an entire app for it possibly unnecessary. However, as one science teacher told us if we could implement ideas of evolution into the app, where the molecules and organelles band together to form more complex organisms, the app could follow the teaching materials for roughly three months of the school year. At this point, we knew that advancing what our app covered was crucial to its usefulness, and our graphic design team began creating prototype screens to represent this.

The Second Day

The next day, I had a basic prototype to send out to our student base. As their responses came back, we had some typical quick fixes – buttons not being where they’re expected to be, unclear wording, and too-small font – but we also received feedback elements that we hadn’t from the teachers. The students wanted a competition element of the app.

Making the app multiplayer was something we had considered, but the student’s desire for it solidified it as something that was necessary. We mocked up more screens of a multiplayer feature that works on local server hosting, so anyone using the same WiFi network can play together. This would allow classes, all on the school’s WiFi, to play against each other in RPG fashion in real-time. Now, the player was not battling computer generated foes, but also their friends.

With our time running short, I began helping our team write out our presentation pitch and finish our slides and I ran our finalized idea and prototype by r/ScienceTeachers once more. The competition element was widely accepted, with one teacher noting that they would allot in-class time to students battling each other in the app, since the content matched what they would be teaching. As one of the two members of the team presenting, I had to balance this last research step with speech memorization and drinking just enough coffee to get me to the stage, but not make me have a heart attack – a thin line to walk. However, the judges seemed receptive to our idea, and noted that our attention to research was the most thorough of any group in the compeition.

My research practices were one of the contributing factors to MicroWars winning first place at this competition and also led me into a job working with Johan to continue developing the idea. In this role, I led the research, helping locate school districts to communicate with, and running our prototypes by science teachers. I pitched MicroWars again for Women in Entrepreneurship, showing off some of the newer research I had done, focusing specifically on the multiplayer ability, and again won first place. As Johan’s company began to expand, I decided to focus my efforts on other companies so I could continue to round out my skill set. This has included various startups as well as MSU departments.