The 2023 Kooba Digital Easter Egg Challenge: A Development Focused Competition

Every Fall, Kooba eagerly awaits Mocktober, our Halloween themed web design contest.

This year, I introduced a new challenge to the team: a more dev focused seasonal competition called The Kooba Digital Easter Egg Challenge.

For anyone who might not be familiar - a digital easter egg is a hidden message or feature found in digital works, like a video game, website or movie trailer. One example of this in a childhood movie staple, Toy Story, Sid’s room holds several references to the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.

Here’s the gist: Come up with an “Easter Egg” concept for Kooba.ie where our users can interact with modules/templates/pages to win a prize.

The submissions were, not surprisingly, fantastic from both developers and designers, supported with rich user journeys, designs/mockups and prototypes.

The team voted for Senior UX/UI Designer Duncan’s brilliant idea for Kooba Codewords.

But I couldn't let the other ideas go unseen. Here are the submissions for the 2023 Kooba Digital Easter Egg Challenge starting with our winner:

1. Duncan - agency anagrams

Play Kooba’s version of Wordle – Agency Anagrams. When the challenge begins, users can visit Kooba.ie and reveal the letters by hunting around the site. Then, users can enter their guess through the Agency Anagrams form. Find the letters. Enter your guess. Win the prize.

2. Sean - find the eggs

After the user is prompted from our socials, they’ll land on Kooba.ie. By interacting with a scissor icon, the user can cut the footer to reveal the challenge. ‘Crack the code. Find the eggs around Kooba.ie, crack the code to be in with chance to win XYZ’. Each egg contains the letters you’ll need. Find the eggs and crack the code.

3. Claire - seasonal emojis

When the user clicks on a title, image, arrow etc, an emoji pops up and take over the screen.. The feature would include seasonal variants (Halloween, Christmas, Easter, Pride, Paddy’s Day) so that if a user visited Kooba.ie on special days, the emoji they are shown would be suitable for that occasion.

4. Tom - secret messages

This is the idea: secret messages in project titles and in project body text that is the same colour as the background. That way, when the text is selected, the user can see the hidden message.

5. Ross - interactive Easter egg hunt

Here are the instructions for the Easter Egg Hunt:

The Easter Egg Hunt is on! Find all 6 Easter eggs to claim your prize. You will need to hunt down 6 Easter eggs that are hidden across the site. Hover over the correct elements to find the Easter Eggs. The final Easter egg will contain details to a form page -complete the form to claim your prize. First person to complete the form wins.

Example of a clue may look like: ‘Look for a case study that will drive you to the next egg. An arrow on the page to help you on your way.’ The user then navigates to the Volkswagen Case Study page.

6. Angeliki - help us fix our website

At the end of a page on Kooba.ie, there will will a CTA ‘Play’. The game will start with a Homepage reload, and the only way to get out of the game is with a key shortcut.

Once the game starts, the website will appear broken, featuring strange colour changes, and other obvious content alterations. To fix the pages, the user has to find our team members who will randomly ‘run’ across the screen. To fix the different problems, find the specific character who can help you. Ed and Emmet can fix the whole page, but they’re hard to find.

On the bottom of the page, there will be a scoreboard where the user can keep track of the problems they’ve fixed.

Once the user fixes all the issues, they will receive a congratulatory popup and a gift from us if they submit their information.

7. Elena - random Kooba website generator

At the footer of Kooba.ie, there will be a Randomiser button that brings you to a random Kooba website that we have designed and built. Rolling over the button activates 3D emojis!