​The Protothon by DubsTech and Design Buddies is back.

​Design at 10x speed. No code. Just design.

​Think you know the design process? Now try it in a fast-paced, high-energy challenge where you’ll take an idea from problem space to polished prototype in just one event.

​Work solo or with a team (of up to 5 members), explore real-world prompts across tracks like classic, mental wellbeing, food, and travel, and push your creativity under time pressure.

​​🧠 How It Works

​​You’ll take on a real-world UX challenge and rapidly prototype a solution—no coding required. Just bring your creativity, curiosity, and a good internet connection.

​​1️⃣ Understand the Problem
Pick from one of our prompt tracks: Classic, Enterprise, Travel, or Mental Well Being. Each track will challenge you with a unique, open-ended design problem.

​​2️⃣ Ideate & Sketch
Do some user research, sketch your concepts, sort your ideas—anything goes. The goal is to explore bold ideas fast.

​​3️⃣ Prototype It
Use tools like Figma, Sketch, or Webflow to build out your polished solution. Make it beautiful, make it functional!

​​4️⃣ Submit & Win!
Your design will be judged by top UX professionals from across the industry. Best designs win awesome prizes! 🎁

​​🔥 Event Tracks

​​🎯 Classic Track: Get a chance to focus on crafting a new experience. This could be a feature in an app, a redesigned website, or an entirely new platform! 

​​💼 Enterprise Track: Design for business! This track focuses on empowering large corporations with the tools they need for daily operations, analytics, and business intelligence.

​❤️‍🩹 Mental Well Being Track: Design for mental wellbeing! This track focuses on creating thoughtful, human-centered solutions that support emotional health, daily wellness habits, self-reflection, and access to meaningful care resources.

​​🏙️ Travel Track: Step into the future of travel by designing smarter, more human-centered experiences—from trip planning and navigation to accessibility, safety, and seamless exploration.

​​🌟 Judges from Across the UX Galaxy

​​Get your designs reviewed by an elite panel of UX experts from companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, T-Mobile, and more!

​• Adam Syed – Founder, Skywalker
• Aditi Gupta – UX Designer, Microsoft
• Afsal Basith – Product Designer, TPConnects
• Alice Li – Product Designer II, Health Stream
• Amol Sood – Director, User Experience, Oracle
• Augustina Liu – Senior Product Designer, Toast
• Darshil Vora – Product Design, Salesforce
• EJ Lim – User Experience Interaction Designer, Google
• Evan Luputra – Senior UX Designer, Expedia Group
• Haopeng Liu – UX Designer, Microsoft
• Jatin Gupta – Senior Product Designer, T-Mobile
• Jay Hari – Product Design, Meta
• Kruti Mehta – Design Director, Additive Agency
• Lingshuang Kong – Product Designer, TikTok
• Mookesh Patel – Professor Emeritus, Arizona State University
• Nagesh Sawant – Principal Engineer, T-Mobile
• Nuoran Chen – Product Designer, The New York Times
• Olumide Durotoluwa – Senior Product Manager, M-KOPA
• Pragya Srivastava – CEO and Principal UX Designer, Ctrl+Design
• Pratik Joglekar – Senior Product Designer, HubSpot
• Purvi Joshi – Manager, Software, AWS
• Rishabh Aggarwal – Member of Technical Staff Frontend, OpenAI
• Rohan Pal – Technical Program Manager, Abnormal AI
• Sayed Abdelaal – UX Design Lead, Atos
• Sheraz Butt – Product Designer, Piktochart
• Shiva Sah – Senior Product Designer, Cisco
• Simran Tank – Product Designer Senior Associate, JP Morgan Chase
• Sonia Song – Interaction Designer, Google
• Stan Khoruzhenko – Senior Staff Product Designer, AngelList
• Stefanie McLaren – Senior Product Designer, Grammarly
• Yuchuan Yu – UX Designer, Microsoft
• Yumei Feng – Product Designer, Orby.ai
• Zubin Chopra – Senior Software Engineer, LinkedIn

​​👾 Organized by DubsTech x Design Buddies

​​About DubsTech

​​DubsTech is a student club at the University of Washington Information School (@uwischool ) focused on accelerating people’s careers in tech. We host free workshops, talks, and hackathons on data science, UX design, software engineering, and cyber security.

​​Follow us on:
Instagram | Discord | YouTube | Facebook

​​About Design Buddies

​​@design.buddies is a community where you level up your design career. Make lifelong friends, improve your design craft, and land jobs. We have free resources, events, design challenges, a job board, fun perks, and more. Hop in here: Join Discord Server

​​Have questions? 📬

​​Reach out at dubstech@uw.edu Or check out our FAQ