Beautiful design (Glossy Pixels)
The design draws inspiration from the Weasley twins and their magical shop, embracing a playful and chaotic style with vibrant colors and patterns that break away from traditional design norms. Students highly value an app that combines bold, dynamic visuals with a user-friendly interface, as it greatly enhances their overall experience. A well-designed app with exceptional UX ensures they can navigate effortlessly and enjoyably, making it easy to access the information they need.
Our talented designer uses Figma to craft stunning designs that developers can seamlessly follow. Here are some examples of the designer’s work from today, which greatly simplifies the development process. Here is the color palette and the inspiration behind it:
Starting with the homepage, we want to give users a dynamic and engaging experience that reflects the app’s content and features. The idea is for the buttons to move and change positions, much like the shifting staircases at Hogwarts. While this might challenge usability, the goal is to highlight the app’s diverse possibilities and encourage exploration, ensuring no features are overlooked.
Houses Score, Quidditch and owlpost (Fabric) (Dash It Out)
House scores play a crucial role in students’ daily experiences throughout the year. To streamline this process, we aim to digitize the scores, making it easier for students to track which house has the highest score and understand the reasons behind it. Teachers continuously award and deduct points, so it’s essential for students to stay updated on the latest scores.
We plan to utilize Fabric’s OneLake to store our data, which is then visualized in our Power BI dashboards. These dashboards represent all the houses, their scores, and the teachers’ reasons for awarding or deducting points. Additionally, we include data about owl post and Quidditch, providing a comprehensive view of all aspects of student life at Hogwarts.
The App (Low-Code)
Students need a single place to find all the information they need to navigate life at Hogwarts. They need easy access to the school system to know which lessons to attend. Some may even need a Time-Turner to attend all their lessons.
Our mobile-friendly canvas app leverages the fantastic native drag-and-drop features Power Apps offers. With beautiful galleries, powerful data integration, and intuitive user interfaces, our app provides a seamless experience for students.
PCF (Pro-Code) (Power User Love)
It’s crucial for students to know who is in their house, but currently, there’s no system in place to facilitate this. Implementing a digital, visual, and accessible solution would be a smart move.
Low-code and pro-code can coexist peacefully. We have found a PCF component online, created by this cool dude called Scott Durow. We hope his code meets the judges’ expectations. Power Apps development and integrations is quite new to the pro-coder so this is still a work in progress, but we plan to use the component Network View (Network View | PCF Gallery).
From no system to complete digital solution (Digital transformation)
Hogwarts currently has no digital system (they send mail by owls). We want to digitize everything a student may need to navigate life at Hogwarts.
We plan to use multiple technologies from the platform, including Power BI, Fabric, Power Apps, and Copilot Studio. These technologies work (more or less) seamlessly with each other and will help us create a complete digital solution.
DEV-TEST-PROD (ALM)
Fred and George have never created an app before, so they need our assistance. We’ve explained the importance of ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) to them and set up three Power Platform environments.
Given that we’re participating in a hackathon for just a few days and the solution is currently quite small, we’ve decided to use the environment-centric approach (Environment vs. Source code centric ALM approach ยป Benedikt’s Power Platform Blog). While this is the most commonly used method, it has several drawbacks, such as vulnerability to environment issues, aging configurations, and reliance on manual deployments.
The magical students love the app (Magic Matrix)
All the students at Hogwarts love the app because it makes their daily lives easier. Transitioning from “pen and paper” to a fully digital solution is usually challenging, but for the students at Hogwarts, it was seamless. They appreciate having everything in one place, making it easy to navigate and find what they need.
I wish I had a similar app when I was a student. Back then, everything was scattered across different systems: one for school, one for living arrangements, one for information, one for stores, one for events, and another for books. Each had its own system, making it difficult to find anything. That’s why we believe it’s smart to consolidate everything into one place, making it easier to find.
The app isn’t just for school-related tasks; it also includes information about events, stores in Hogsmeade, where to find the cheapest butterbeer, sending pranks, and many other fun features the twins came up with.