Stop Making People Hunt
Picture this: you're at a massive fest. 2,000 people, five stages, and you're trying to find the workshop you signed up for. There's no signage that makes sense. You're flipping between a PDF schedule and a crowd you can barely see over. By the time you find the right zone, the session's half over.
That's the chaos Hack2Skill × PromptWars handed us. I had 3.5 hours, solo. h3 The obvious move, and why I skipped it
The brief listed a lot: navigation, discovery, announcements, safety. The obvious play was to build a thin version of everything and hope the breadth read as ambition. normal Instead I asked a narrower question. What actually removes friction for one person standing in that crowd, phone in hand, lost?
The answer wasn't a better map. It was: stop making people hunt.
What that bought me
Three things, done properly.
Zone and session discovery. Every stage, food court, restroom, and help desk plus the full schedule on one screen.
Tap a zone, get an interactive map with walking directions from where you're standing. No flipping between a map and a PDF, no asking three volunteers where the right tent is.
One-tap SOS with zone detection. "Confusing" and "unsafe" are different problems, and the second one needed a fast answer. Tap it, and the organiser sees it live — your GPS location and the zone you're nearest to.
Live announcements. The organiser posts, every screen updates, no refresh.
The reason this shipped at all is Convex's live queries. Real-time SOS and announcements with no websocket code — useQuery re-renders on change. That's hours I got back, and I spent them on the interface instead of plumbing.
The part that's actually the work
Crowd heatmaps. Accessibility-filtered routing. An AI concierge that answers "where's the nearest accessible restroom?" All cut. On purpose.
In 3.5 hours you don't get to build everything. You get to figure out what removes the most friction, and make sure that part just works.
A feature nobody reaches for isn't a small win — it's a tax on the ones they do.
The other constraint was tooling: I was building with Antigravity and its limits hit sooner than I'd planned, so what you see is what fit. I'd rather show a finished thing with honest edges than an unfinished thing with impressive intentions.
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