Role

User experience design | User interface design | Prototyping | Circuit board silkscreening | User testing

Context

One of the most unique things you can find at Signal is the Hackpack, a piece of swag that you can interact with at the conference, or totally hack the thing and make it do whatever you want!

The Hackpack V.4 allowed the conference attendees to participate in interactive activities directly from the device or at specific locations. It was also a wallet that tracked the points that the attendee had earned by attending sessions and workshops, which they could later spend at the swag store.

Form

The idea was to build the most robust Hackpack in the history of Hackpacks, it had to come with a screen, it needed a directional pad and a certain number of buttons like an old school arcade. We also included a power bank that provided the user with enough juice to last a whole day at SIGNAL.
Rubix cubing all these elements around the circuit board using lots of paper prototypes, we landed on a classic layout.

Claim your Hackpack

I focused on designing a flow and interface that made it as easy as possible for Signal attendees to claim a Hackpack, allowing them to get started just by texting the unique code on the Hackpack’s screen.

Real world & avatar swag

The previous iterations of the Hackpack had always been single function devices, but the Hackpack V.4 had the potential to do more. The team and I conducted some research and reviewed requests and identified some functions that the Hackpack could handle.

One of its main functions is to keep track of the number of points earned by every attendee while attending presentations and participating in activities around the conference. The points earned could then be used in exchange for swag at different booths.

Attendees would also be able to redeem swag for their TwilioQuest avatar. The team and I created a total of 267 new and unique avatar items ranging from a Twilio t-shirt to Samus’ helmet!

Activities for days

The interactive experience was a big priority, so there were other ways to collecting points outside of attending the presentations and workshops.

There were stations set up where attendees could match up in up to a 3V3 game of Signal Pong, or take a pledge to Go Vote in front of a big screen where they could see every attendee who took the pledge as well.

The team and I really wanted the attendees to keep the interaction going outside of the conference, so we created a back door that allowed you to use the Hackpack as anything you want, something we affectionally called the Hacked-pack.

Signal 2018

Signal Pong

Voting

Shirt Factory