HV Vault - Community Ranking Platform
HV Vault gives the Fine Arts community something it never had: an audience score for Human Video. I designed and built a 1-vs-1 ranking platform that turns years of informal 'best of all time' debates into a living leaderboard and archive — and launched it at Nationals, where the ranking engine drew 400+ accounts in its first week.
I've been part of Fine Arts since sixth grade — first as a student performer, later as a college coach. Human Video has always had a judges' score: a panel decides the final round every year, the equivalent of a critics score. What it never had was a community score. Everyone in the community carries their own ranked list of the greatest human videos of all time, and debating those lists is half the fun — but there was no way to capture it, settle it, or share it.
There also was no single place to watch the best of all time. No definitive list existed — not even on the Fine Arts website — so anyone curious about Human Video, or about Fine Arts itself, had no easy way in.
Product Definition
- Wrote a product requirements document (working in Claude), defining the core mechanic: head-to-head 1-vs-1 comparisons that refine into a community leaderboard and a permanent archive of top performances
- Modeled the concept on the critics-vs-audience split: judges' results already exist; HV Vault adds the missing audience score
Build
- Built hvvault.com myself in Webflow — the public site, plus a resource library for first-time Human Video coaches
- Built the ranking engine (rankthevault.com) in Lovable from the PRD — the 1-vs-1 comparisons, leaderboard, and archive
- Built an admin tool for myself to track analytics — what was performing, what wasn't — and refine features from real usage
- Iterated directly on user feedback from the community after launch
Launch — Nationals, St. Louis (first week of August 2026)
- Built the platform in July 2026 and hard-launched it in person at the AG National Fine Arts Festival
- Printed business cards with a QR code; students I coached each carried 20–30 cards and distributed them across the convention
- On the final day, during the final round of Human Video callbacks, cards were placed on the seats so the audience could vote on the large-group finalists in the moment
- 400+ accounts created on the ranking engine within the first week of launch, generated entirely in person at Nationals
- Created the first community-driven ranking and archive of the best Human Videos of all time — a resource that did not previously exist anywhere, including the Fine Arts website
- Strong direct feedback from the community, with user-requested refinements shipped back into the product
- In conversation with the Fine Arts organization about partnering to grow community involvement with the tool next year
- Raised awareness of Human Video and Fine Arts for newcomers, who can now start from the community's best work
