Nailed my final presentation for my HP Project

I just had to come on here and gloat a little. First I'll give you some backstory. I'm in an HCI class right now (Human Computer Interfaces) and we have been doing a project for HP where we come up with an idea using sensor technology to solve an issue in the home, when then were to implement the idea into low fidelity prototypes and test these prototypes and come up with a final version to present for a concept. My team and I have been talking about our idea for a while and were not too worried about the final presentation until about a week and a half ago when we found out we needed two rounds of testing along with a final prototype, a video, a poster, and a presentation. All in a week! And on top of all this I've had three take home finals that were due today along with the presentation and an in class final this morning.

So we worked hard. We met just about everyday since last Friday until today to go over the presentation and the testing and do new interface designs and go out and test users. Since Wednesday we've been done with our testing and worked on finishing the video and poster and presentation. I was in charge of the video and the powerpoint. Anyway, we've all pretty much been hating on HP for a few weeks and eve posting death threats as our statuses on Facebook. I don't know if I've done justice to the stress level but I'll move on.

We presented today after 7 other teams. We showed our video and then presented our powerpoint to explain the solution more in depth. After about 8 minutes we had finished explaining our product and got ready for our feedback. On feedback, we've had two feedback sessions with HP throughout our process and for the most part they have been somewhat negative and critical, so we have kind of gotten used to the fact that they always want something more than they really told us and we got to a point where we stopped worrying about if they would like it or not. So to be honest I didn't care much if they liked it or not. So we got our feedback and something ensued that I did not expect at all.

"Best presentation that we've seen to date," was said more than once. There were three reps from HP and each one said that we had the best presentation so far. "You've taken our feedback and come up with a solution that sticks to your original idea but really expands it to something that addresses all the issues." "Your presentation does well of showing a broad range of ideas in a very quick and comprehensive form." When I they asked us about our experience doing the project, one of the things I mentioned was that I had never made a video before and one of the guys said seriously that I should go into radio, which I was taken a-back by. And then to top it all off, I tripped on the stairs coming off the stage and fell flat on my face.

There have been three more teams after us and while they have all gotten positive feedback and some of them are better ideas than ours, we retain the "best presentation" trophy which I am proud of because I organized it almost by myself while my team mates provided me with some of the images we used and my ID team mate did the entire look and feel of the poster and the GUI. So I feel pretty proud of myself. Here is the video I made if you want to see it :)

UPDATE: I wrote this before the end of the presentations and afterwards the HP guys chose the three best and ours was one of them. Awesome!