The Gigapan web team came together last Thursday to participate in our first ever hackathon. Our goal was to add new value to the website, do it as a team, and develop the end result in one business day.
We debated on what we could quickly develop. We knew it had to be interesting, a feature our Gigapan community could use, and doable given the self-imposed time constraint. Using our collective voice, we decided to develop Map View, which allows people to view their gigapan in relationship to surrounding gigapans in a Google Map environment. We not only wanted to create an improved geolocation tool for all Gigapan users, but also wanted to reply to recent feedback from our existing members.
Working as a team, we shared our ideas on the engineering design and implementation for this feature. Then, we created a functional prototype and brought this to our in-house creative director, Carrie, who helped us shape and craft our designs into what we hope will be an interesting new way to explore gigapans. What you see today is our initial design. Future features and user interface design will be added to continue improving the geolocation functionality on gigapan.com.
Map View can be explored here or by clicking “View on Map” on any geolocated gigapan. If you want your gigapan included on the map, you can click the "Geolocate" button on your image details page.
We learned a lot and are thinking through everything learned to apply our insights toward our next hackathon. Since the team really enjoyed the challenge and working closely together, we hope to be doing many more.
I'd like to especially thank the Gigapan management team for empowering us to take an entire day to create an exciting new feature in such a short period of time.
