Who’s the best ping pong player at your school? Me, of course.
The answer is from Hannes, the 5th grader who joined us for the Future of Work Day. When challenged on his answer whether some of his friends wouldn’t provide an identical answer, he admitted that it is indeed an unresolved issue for them to determine who’s the best ping pong player on a given day and over time.
Our intention for the day was to give Hannes a hands-on experience of how we build digital products.
Hence, we started by interviewing him about a day in his life. The round robins at the ping pong table during school breaks stood out. So we focussed on solving the issue of the best player once and for all.
We started sketching some ideas for determining the best player at his school. Pens and paper have helped identify potential obstacles and hidden complexities in our thinking. It turned out that the concept had to start with capturing changing participants in a round and the round’s winner. These two metrics would allow us to determine the daily “Pong Score” for each player.
How many rounds did someone play, and how many did they win?
Once we had a simple enough solution on paper, he drafted some simple wireframes in Figma and participated in the design and development handover. First, he created a clickable prototype. Afterward, he got professional help to build a minimal functional prototype. Giving one of our devs some quiet time to crank out the functional prototype, we focused on creating a simple landing page with Framer.
Throughout the day, we took breaks to play ping pong. Unfortunately, the app wasn’t available yet, so the best player within the extended headbits squad still has to be determined.
On the way home, we stopped by the CASUS office to give Hannes an impression of an up-and-coming business we’re working with. Luckily, their offices also have ping-pong tables.
In the end, we provided the app to Hannes and agreed to check back in the coming weeks to see if his initial response (Me, of course.) was correct.
Best of luck, champ!