At Appen, our commitment to innovation is deeply rooted in addressing real-world challenges faced by our contributors. The new Summary Table Tool in our AI Data Platform (ADAP) exemplifies this commitment, developed through the collaborative efforts of our delivery and engineering teams during our latest Hackathon.
Our hackathons serve as a crucible for practical solutions, empowering teams across the organization to create tools that directly respond to user needs. In this case, a team identified a significant flaw in the quality assurance process for labeling text data.
“Many of my QA jobs had nested questions, and to review all the answers, the QA checkers had to go through each sub-question and their answers, which was tedious and prone to errors,” explains Prathamesh Khilare, the Technical Data Collection Manager who submitted this idea for the hackathon.
QA reviewers struggled with managing and reviewing 30 to 50 fields or categories, often leading to excessive scrolling and an increased risk of overlooking errors. “Until now, we’ve been addressing this with custom code,” explains Alok Painuly, a data collection specialist on Khilare’s team. He adds, “This process is tedious and time-consuming, especially when task design changes require manual updates to the platform backend.” This cumbersome process highlighted the need for a more efficient solution.
The result was the Summary Table Tool, which streamlines the review process by consolidating all fields into a single, real-time summary. This innovation was developed by the Hackathon-winning team, guided through the feature development life cycle by an experienced Product Manager. “The team asked for our feedback and improved the feature,” says Khilare. “The swift action in getting the idea implemented is commendable!”
The Summary Table Tool not only reduces time spent scrolling but also enhances accuracy by making it easier to spot errors or omissions. “This new feature is more effective than the current one we proposed during the hackathon,” Painuly adds.
By focusing on real use cases and immediate needs, we deliver innovations that genuinely improve our contributors' workflow and productivity. “This approach is fulfilled in this new feature, and the design is very comfortable and helpful for the contributors,” observes Painuly.
The Summary Table Tool is a testament to how collaborative efforts and hackathons can lead to meaningful advancements that make a tangible difference in our daily operations.
Here’s to continuing our tradition of innovation, driven by the real-world challenges our teams face and the creative solutions they develop.
Learn more: