A 3-day hackathon concept: let users talk their way through onboarding instead of typing, with AI transcription filling the form fields, all built to lift completion rates and open the platform to users who can't easily navigate it today.
Every year, Empower runs a remote company-wide hackathon where anyone can form a team and pitch a new, innovative idea for the business. In 2024, I joined a four-person team: one business analyst, two software engineers, and me on design, with three days to take an idea from a blank canvas to something we could present.
We chose to go after a problem we all recognized: low form-field completion rates. Financial onboarding is a wall of forms: personal details, employment info, account preferences, etc., and every field is a chance to drop off. For many users, typing all of that on a phone is the slowest, most frustrating part of the journey.
What if you could just say it? We bet that AI-enabled speech-to-text transcription for form fields could move two needles at once:
The flow we designed: users answer conversational prompts out loud, AI transcription parses each response and drops it into the right field, and a review step lets them confirm everything before submitting.
We were randomly assigned into teams, so three days meant moving fast with people I'd just met.
Day 1 was meeting the team and brainstorming. The core idea came from our team's business analyst. From there, I worked with everyone to scope out the MVP — the bare-minimum requirements that would make the concept work in three days. On the UI side, I audited form flows and funnels across Empower's various products to find the single screen we could apply the enhancement to most cleanly and still get the message across.
Day 2 was a tight real-time loop with the devs to understand how the transcription would actually work. We settled on a conversational approach: turn each form field into a spoken question: a "Name" field becomes an AI voice asking "What is your name?", and feed the user's audio response into an LLM for transcription. Designing against that mechanic uncovered two questions that I brought to the team:
Day 3 was the pitch, ran in two phases fully remote, all via Microsoft Teams.
Phase 1: present to a panel of five judges: PMs, leads, and directors across various departments. Teams approved by the panel advanced to:
Phase 2: the finalist round, presenting live to all attending employees. The company then opened a company-wide vote for the best idea.
We presented over two days and, at the end of the week, were thrilled to be voted 2nd place overall at the 2024 Empower Hackathon!!
The story didn't end there. From what we were told, the concept and code we built during the hackathon were handed over to the Product and Engineering teams, who are using them as a reference for potential enhancements to Dashboard v2, a full redesign of our current global dashboard and design system that is currently in development. A three-day sprint became real input into a shipping product.
The tight timeline forced sharp trade-offs: with three days and a small cross-functional team, we had to be ruthless about what made the demo and what didn't. Designing in lockstep with two engineers meant every screen had to be buildable now, not someday, a constraint that made the work faster and more honest.
What I'm proud of most is that the idea was grounded in a real, measurable pain point and a genuine accessibility win, not novelty for its own sake. That's what made it resonate with judges and, ultimately, earn a second life inside a real product roadmap.