Challenge Summary
Welcome to "3D Systems - 3DSPRINT Community Challenge". In this challenge, we are looking for the Topcoder community to design the 3D Systems 3DSPRINT Community website. We’re drawing inspiration from a few existing community site examples that will be provided, but we still want to see your creativity and amazing design! Overall we want to design a new user experience that presents a clean modern approach to a community site using the 3D Systems brand.
The long term goal of this project is to create the online home for the 3DSPRINT Platform. The community site is one aspect of this. The site should invite users and potential users to:
- Discover a frustration free landing page, encounter impactful curated information about workflows and feature.
- Experience a self-serviceable on board registration process,
- Find associated assets such as installers for desktop applications,
- Engage in an active user community, and
- Interact with entertaining and educational social content highlighting the state of the art in the platform’s deployment.
At the end of this challenge, we are looking for the best UI/UX exploration and creativity within the brand based on the provided
Round 1
Initial Design Concepts of the below for checkpoint review
1. Home
2. Articles/ Knowledge
3. Cases
Feel free to add any other additional screens which are necessary to explain your concept.
Notes.jpg: Please note any comments about your design for the Client
Round 2
Final Design Concepts with any checkpoint feedback implemented
1. Home
2. Articles/ Knowledge
3. Cases
4. Chatter/ Collaboration
5. Profile
Optional Pages:
6. Known Issues
7. Ideas
8. Groups
Feel free to add any other additional screens which are necessary to explain your concept.
Notes.jpg: Please note any comments about your design for the Client
As part of an effort to aid in building developer communities around 3D Systems products, the 3DSPRINT Community challenge will be the first community developed. We are looking to build a site similar in functionality to success.salesforce.com. This site has some of the functionality and content components that we are looking to build out for 3DSPRINT community. How can you take this site structure and improve on the design look and feel to give it a better UX and to make it unique to 3D Systems brand? Can you take a creative direction and look and feel and translate it into the following pages?
About the Client:
3D Systems is pioneering 3D printing for everyone. 3DS provides the most advanced and comprehensive design-to-manufacturing solutions including 3D printers, print materials and cloud sourced custom parts.
Design Guidelines:
- The site flow should be easy, fun and ease to use.
- Think simple but effective solutions! Have fun creating this.
- Font, colors, style: Follow client branding guidelines. We need you to follow the guidelines strictly yet still being creative!!
- Keep things consistent. This means all graphic styles should work together.
- All of the graphics should have a similar feel and general aesthetic appearance and look like the 3D Systems brand.
- Make sure create all your graphic in 'vector' format (buttons, icons, etc), so when resize for bigger versions, graphic still look sharp!
- Take the 3DSprint brand and use it to design this 3DSprint Community site. The attached source .ai file (see below) should be your guide for designing for the 3D Sprint Brand
- Reference previous 3D Systems challenge outputs as to the the exploration that we want to see (Open Haptics & SDK).
- You can grab the logo from the attached file "3D Systems Examples screenshot and Logo.zip"
- Please design it for desktop with size as 1024px width and height as needed.
Creative Considerations:
We have run some previous challenges for 3D Systems and want to supply you with those creative assets for you to use for this design challenge. We like the general look and feel for these and want to see how you can apply this to the community page.
- 3DSprint Brand: (This should be your primary design direction. Reference the samples and the provide .ai file for guidance)
- OpenHaptics: (This is a sample of a previous 3D Systems design challenge and representative of the exploration that we want you to take for this challenge)
- Touch SDK: (This is a sample of a previous 3D Systems design challenge and representative of the exploration that we want you to take for this challenge)
- Community Sample Sites (These are other examples of community sites that you should draw inspiration from)
Sections to Focus On:
- We would like you to really focus on the detail within your design.
- Your use and variation of hues (color), addition of textures, icon representation (rotation, enlarging, watermarks, texture addition), concentration on small details will make all the difference in this challenge.
Screen Requirements:
1. Home
- Take the home page for Success.Salesforce.com and apply 3D Systems Brand approach. Make it a mix of Open Haptics landing page, Open Haptics SDK, and existing 3DSprint look and feel (attached)
- Consider how you can work in a chatter feed to your home page. A Chatter feed is a Salesforce element that allows for easy collaboration and communication for a community. Expanding on a chatter topic will take the user to the Chatter section of the community site.
- Work in a Chatter Feed into your home page?
- What is a better way to organize this page to allow users easy access to knowledge, articles, cases, and chatter?
- Consider good user experience examples for dashboards in your design considerations
- Below are few examples from above reference home page, for which you really need to pay attention to detail
Banners:
Client would love to see some creative banner exploration as part of this challenge.
- The homepage banner is the greeting to this user community, so make it shine and catch the eye!
- Please provide 2 banner designs with a carousel feature.
- We have provided copy below for the banner and please see the banner example image below.
- The banner is the first thing a user will see, so let it set the tone for the rest of your creative design!
- What kind of 3D Systems spin can you do for the banner graphic and carousel elements?
1st Welcome banner:
Your 3DSprint Community (header)
Together. Manufacturing the Future. (as sub-copy)
2nd Welcome banner:
Faster. Simpler. Connected. (header)
Your 3DSprint user community (sub-copy)
Community Bar:
- On the success.salesforce.com site you will see this visualized ‘community bar’ (please see Community_bar.png)
- What kind of detail and design can you bring to an element like this that wows 3D Systems?
- What type of brand infusion will you create?
- Again, think shapes, textures, color gradients and subtle color highlights - what will you design? PLEASE don’t copy the elements, but be inspired by them as you create!
Suggested Apps:
- you will see this horizontal ‘suggested apps’ bar (please see ‘suggested apps.png’).
- For 3D Systems this space can potentially be used to visually show a user other 3D Systems Communities they could navigate to from this ‘bar’.
To research other 3D Systems products that will have user communities go to www.3dsystems.com and visit these tabs: Products and Software that you see such as “Geomagic Sculpt” “Geomagic Freeform” and products like “Sense” you can see from the Scanners tab on the left hand side (see green arrows in attached image 'geomagic_sculpt.png')
2. Articles / Knowledge:
- Take a page like this Salesforce example and apply a better user experience for how to find, search, and read articles and knowledge.
- Consider showing an article detail page. Take this sample page and apply a clean and simple 3D Systems brand approach to it.
- Having a robust and easy to use search functionality is very important.
3. Cases:
- Take the same design approach that you’ve used for Articles and Knowledge and apply it to Cases.
- Cases are a way for community members to interact and collaborate on an open issues
- Take this page example and apply the 3DSystems brand to it
- It’s important to show “ask a question functionality” and collaboration threads on the case
4. Chatter / Collaboration:
- Design a detailed Chatter feed for the community. This is basically an open forum for the community to post questions and collaborate on.
- Allow for comment threads
- See Salesforce chatter example (choose "feed drill-in" in that page)
- Should support file attachments (Word, Video, JPG, PDF)
- See how you can embed a chatter feed into your home page
5. Profile:
- Design a basic profile section for a registered user
- It should contain content items that they’ve recently viewed (Cases, Articles, Knowledge)
- It should include recent posts from the user in Chatter
- It should include basic profile information about the user
- It should include files they’ve uploaded
- Possibly include the user influence level. What are they experts in?
Bonus Pages (Optional Pages):
The client would love to see a few other key pages designed.
NOTE - these are considered bonus pages. We’d like you to focus on the top 5 above and if your time permits the following pages would be great to also see
6. Known Issues
- This could follow the design of your Cases design page
Reference Page: https://success.salesforce.com/issues_index
- This page shows the list of known issues that were reported by the community
7. Ideas
- This could be similar to the Salesforce community page example.
- Include a simple vote up or down
- Reference Page: https://success.salesforce.com/ideaSearch
- This page list the ideas that were shared by the community
- We would like to just see the landing page on how it would look like
8. Groups
- This could be similar to the Salesforce community page example.
-Reference Page: https://success.salesforce.com/userGroups
- This page shows the users groups across the world.
- It would good to incorporate a map with the list of groups
Inspiration Reference and other Considerations:
- We want to see how you draw inspiration from sites like success.salesforce.com. The design and user experience should be clean and easy to use
- The design should be attractive to the developer community
- The design should foster education and learning about 3DSPRINT
- The design should be well thought out as we will roll this out to other 3D Systems products
- The design should cater to the community.
Target Audience:
- Developers and the diverse and growing 3DSystems user base.
Judging Criteria
- How well you plan the user experience and capture your ideas visually
- Cleanliness of your graphics and design
- Your design should possible to build and make sense for desktop and mobile devices (responsive)
Submission & Source Files
Preview Image
Please create your preview image as one (1) 1024x1024px JPG or PNG file in RGB color mode at 72dpi and place a screenshot of your submission within it.
Submission File
Submit JPG/PNG for your submission files.
Source Files
All original source files of the submitted design. Files should be created in Adobe Photoshop and saved as layered PSD file, or Adobe Illustrator as a layered AI file.
Final Fixes
As part of the final fixes phase you may be asked to modify your graphics (sizes or colors) or modify overall colors. We may ask you to update your design or graphics based on checkpoint feedback.
Please read the challenge specification carefully and watch the forums for any questions or feedback concerning this challenge. It is important that you monitor any updates provided by the client or Studio Admins in the forums. Please post any questions you might have for the client in the forums.