Potluckey

The program structures the sprint into three phases: Engage (days 1 to 2) to land on a challenge, Investigate (days 3 to 18) split between research and design and development, and Act (days 19 to 20) for the pitch and the post-mortem. Twenty days is not long to go from nothing to a working app, and that pressure shaped most of what follows.

We opened with a team brainstorm where everyone brought their core ideas, distilled into themes like culture, animal welfare and sports. A mapping exercise surfaced the shared thread: traditions. Structured questioning (how, what, why, who) and a round of voting crystallized the Essential Question we would carry into research:

What do we need to consider about traditions?

Our first framing was about fostering “traditional relationships,” a concept we believed could connect people across cultures. Then we took it into surveys and interviews, and the term fell apart: some read it as outdated, others as romantic relationships from another era.

We kept the goal of connection and changed the medium. Food emerged from the research as the most immediate and universal way in, especially for international students navigating a new cultural landscape. That reframe became Potluckey: a platform built around shared culinary experiences, personal and relevant in a way the original framing never was.

Designing Potluckey was not a linear journey. Unforeseen circumstances kept me away from the initial UI sprint, and the team's early prototype, despite their best efforts, missed the vision. It lacked coherence and usability, and a major review was hours away.

When I returned I redirected the course: using frameworks I had developed earlier, I reimagined the prototype in about twenty minutes. Still work-in-progress, but it immediately resonated with what we were trying to build. From there, mentor feedback and quick testing sessions within the cohort refined it iteratively into the design that stuck, one people kept describing as simple and warm.

With three weeks total, our three developers (me included) merged design and development instead of running them in sequence. We broke the work into focused tasks:

For the more complex logic we leaned on generative AI to accelerate the build. The goal in this phase was blunt: as many fully functional screens as possible before pitch day, without letting the design's fidelity slip. The result was a working prototype that carried the essence of the vision inside the deadline.

Our project was presented at the Apple Foundation x UTS Startups Program Showcase, in front of Apple executives and industry leaders. What started as an idea three weeks earlier was now something tangible we could proudly hand to people.

Hearing positive feedback from such experienced leaders made the late nights and hard decisions worth it. It was a celebration less of the product than of how far the team had come.

You do not truly understand collaboration until you have debated, compromised, and still delivered. Our team spanned a high school graduate, a bachelor's student and an older couple, mostly without design backgrounds, and the differences showed up in real decisions. I designed a checkbox with accessible colors; the team preferred a scheme that failed accessibility standards. Explaining the reasoning behind the choice resolved the conflict and pulled everyone closer to the design process itself.

The biggest debate was the logo. A teammate generated one with AI; I had spent hours refining mine around the app's purpose. Instead of just showing my design, I walked through the thinking behind every element. The team went with it, and the lesson has outlasted the project: advocate for your vision, and back it with reasoning rather than preference.

And SwiftUI. Building the app myself changed how I design. The learning curve was steep, but I now think about feasibility and development constraints while designing, which makes collaborating with developers a very different conversation.