Hack Appleton

Category

Scoring Criteria

Business Utility

Technical Tool’s Potential Impact & Relevance

Technical tool indicates awareness of one of the business’s clear & pressing needs, and stays focused on this pain point throughout. It is likely to have a material effect on operating the business.

Effectiveness & Usefulness

Technical tool efficiently executes on its stated purpose. It provides a lot of value (informational or otherwise) to users, paying particular attention to address their pain points.

Creativity & Design

Intuitiveness & Ease-of-Use

Using the technical tool feels natural and smooth, not jarring and uncomfortable. It does not ask them to do more than what is absolutely necessary.

Originality & Visual Beauty

Technical tool idea & style layout are unconventional yet fit with the business. Its visuals draw in the user and leave them wanting to learn and see more. Icons, logos, and controls are colorful and high-resolution.

Engineering

Technical Sophistication

Technical tool capabilities are varied and not run-of-the-mill. They demonstrate an understanding of and ability to synthesize more complex coding elements into a final end product.

Robustness

Technical tool’s underlying code is clean and efficient, and is easy to modify and upgrade. It also smoothly handles edge cases and exceptions that might be caused by improper utilization by the user or intermediate artifacts of the program itself (e.g. out-of-range input values).