Building a Responsive Interface with Kiro: My first hackathon project

Source: Dev.to

My first hackathon project and an experiment in interaction design.

It began as a simple Halloween diary but quickly turned into a small digital world that pushed my understanding of UI behaviour and UX constraints. The goal shifted from “a themed diary” to building an interface that responds to the user—the app reacts when you move, when you stop, when you write, when you switch tabs, when you try to leave, and parts of the environment come alive after inactivity.

This post explains the architecture, the trade‑offs, the mistakes, and how Kiro influenced the engineering process.

Behavioural System

The core idea was that the UI should respond to behaviour:

• Tab switching triggers short status messages.
• Cursor inactivity causes certain components to animate or shift.
• Extended inactivity prompts environmental changes.
• Focused sections reduce visual noise.

These features rely on lightweight, event‑driven state machines and tightly controlled side effects. The aim was to maintain predictability even as the behavioural layer became more involved.

Architecture and Stack

• React with TypeScript
• TailwindCSS
• Firebase for authentication and Firestore
• Vite
• Internal state machines for behaviour decisions
• Custom animation hooks
• Utility modules to isolate logic

Most of the work went into preventing the behavioural features from overwhelming the render cycle. The hardest part was deciding which components should respond to user inputs and which should remain static. Too much activity creates noise; too little undermines the concept for the costume contest.

Working With Kiro

Documentation

The project kept its evolving specifications inside the .kiro folder, including the Haunted Diary spec, scrapbook flow diagrams, interaction rules, and trigger definitions. This acted as a reference point as the direction changed rapidly.

Refactoring and Code Quality

Kiro repeatedly refactored components, reorganized structure, removed redundant logic, and improved readability. It prevented the project from drifting into an unmanageable architecture—a common hackathon failure mode.

Testing

Kiro wrote, refined, and expanded test suites, identifying edge cases early and ensuring behavioural triggers did not contradict each other.

Performance

The first version struggled with render timing. Kiro helped identify unnecessary re‑renders, reorganized several components, and improved lazy‑loading strategies to maintain smooth interaction.

Error Handling and Compliance

Kiro added guardrails, mapped error states, and guided compliance for user content, including FIPPA considerations. The result is a safer and more predictable application.

Tooling and Micro‑Interactions

Small UX touches emerged from working with Kiro: tooltips, animation timing, message tone, and micro‑responses that make the environment feel cohesive.

Challenges

The project was ambitious for a first hackathon submission:

• State confusion occurred because multiple versions of certain components existed.
• The sensory‑balance problem required deliberate tuning.
• Behavioural triggers occasionally competed with one another, and improving their priority logic took time.

This project became an exploration of animated UX and demonstrated how Kiro can function as a structured engineering partner—it contributed to documentation, refactoring, testing, performance tuning, and architectural decisions. For a first hackathon submission and working alone, the workflow felt closer to a real engineering process than a rushed weekend build.