Forty undergraduate and masters Design School students were grouped into User Experience (UX) agencies on Friday 18 November and given briefs by different ‘clients’, formed by students at the Business Lab MBA programme at Hong Kong University, in preparation for a UXathon (UX hackathon) on Saturday 26 November. In a single day they sketched personas, conceptualised, prototyped and delivered impressive UX solutions for their clients in Hong Kong.

After a live feed with Hong Kong at the start of the Saturday, teams scattered across the LDS building to work through their briefings, supported by Deloitte Digital mentors – Matt Pettitt, Julie Moolman and Pete Boam; as well as LDS mentors - Val Mitchell, Carolina Escobar-Tello, André Brito and Garrath Wilson. Final presentations started at 16.45 and, despite the eight hours’ time difference, some of the Hong Kong clients stayed up in solidarity.

To conclude the day, Deloitte Digital’s Matt Pettitt delivered two team awards and praised all participating students saying: “the quality of what you produced and how much you’ve achieved in a day is really impressive”. 

Pedro Eloy, Head of the BusinessLab HKU MBA program, congratulated all teams for their “excellent work” and said he was “already looking forward to future cooperation between the 2 universities”. Several LDS students volunteered very positive feedback too, including requests for it to be repeated each term.

The UXathon was organised by Val Mitchell and André Brito from Loughborough Design School and by Pedro Eloy, Head of the BusinessLab HKU MBA program, voted number 1 MBA in Asia by The Economist since 2010.