Automating theDubCoin distribution system
DubHacks rewards hackers with coins for attending workshops.
Dubcoins are DubHacks' incentive currency. Hackers earn them by attending workshops and redeem them for prizes.
Jump to final design→The Dubcoin distribution system was the biggest pain point of 2024.
Everything ran through a single Excel sheet. Staff manually looked up hackers, edited rows, and verified student IDs — in a packed ballroom, under pressure. Lines stretched around the room. What should've taken minutes took three hours. Staff were overwhelmed.
Staff were being used as the system — instead of a system doing the work.
We walked through last year's flow step by step: staff interviews, debrief notes, and every manual touchpoint.
Manual
Every transaction required a staff member to edit a spreadsheet by hand.
Opaque
Hackers had to remember how many DubCoins they had.
Disconnected
Staff had to match a hacker's balance to available prizes manually.
The Hacker Profile, in full.
The Hacker Profile gives every hacker visibility — and gives staff a one-tap redemption flow.
Personalized Welcome
Greets each hacker by name with their live Dubcoin balance front and center.
Toggle between views
Switch from scanning to redeeming DubCoins.
Scan QR codes
Earn DubCoins by scanning QR codes at workshops.
Personal QR code
Every hacker gets one. Staff scan it at the prize table — no typing, no Excel.
Live earn notifications
Congrats, you just earned 15 Dubcoins from this workshop.
Activity feed
A full log of every event attended and every coin earned.
Staff could focus on hackers, not spreadsheets.
The 2025 distribution ran without the chaos that defined 2024. What took three hours became a scan-and-tap flow.
Our constraints shaped the design.
We had a whole self-checkout idea that got cut because the tech wasn't there yet. But the thing we built instead — scan, tap, redeem — was cleaner. Sometimes the constraint does the design thinking for you.
