Disrupt3rs Design Direction Challenge

Welcome to “Disrupt3rs Design Direction Challenge”!  This is a new type of challenge for Topcoder Design. The goal of this challenge is to quickly create "design direction" guidance for our customer project. Our customer is currently holding a design thinking workshop and they would like to use the artifacts and ideas from that workshop to inspire you (topcoder community) to see what ideas and concepts you would like to contribute back to continue the design process. The goal of "Design Direction" is to not create high-fidelity designs but to focus in on thinking through the problem and proposing a direction for the project. Design Direction is a little bit of Information Architecture, a little bit of UI/UX design work to help inspire the customer and to inspire a future designer of the idea, product, or app.

We are looking for you to look over the requirements and proposed features and put together high-level information and visual direction that will become input into the UI challenge.

This is a fast challenge, so make sure you are using your time wisely. Welcome to this exciting new Topcoder Design challenge type and please don't hesitate to ask any questions in the forum.


Important Rule Change for the Design Direction Challenge
You are allowed to submit your designs at any time during this challenge. You are allowed to submit to the final phase even if you did not submit to the checkpoint phase. All submissions will be accepted (that pass screening).

Note: while we are allowing this challenge to be "open" throughout we do recommend you submit to the checkpoint as we are reviewing LIVE with the customer during their workshop. Good luck!

Round 1

Submit design direction documentation for the checkpoint deadline:

• Throw all your initial ideas here!
• The teams will be reviewing your checkpoints as a group and providing fast feedback

Round 2

Submit your updated design direction documentation for the final deadline and improved based on the checkpoint feedback:

• All your concepts screens

Challenge Objectives

• Focus on what you think is important in the customer's project and provide design direction back to them on where you think the project should go.
• Create wireframes, sketches or simple designs to convey your design direction
• Provide guidance on your idea, color palettes, typography, shapes, etc.
• Provide fast and rough wireframes to show your concepts.

Project Background

• This challenge is meant to serve as a precursor to a regular UI design challenge. You can think of it as a “FAST Wireframe Challenge", however, we are not looking for full-fledged wireframes.
• We are also looking for suggestions on Color Palette, Typography & Icons style, and overall notes about the look and feel of the application
• We’d like to see how you think the application could work, potential workflows and interactions.
• Think of this as a low-fidelity design concepts challenges.

Overview
The purpose of this challenge is to come up with concepts for a web platform that  crowdsources ideas and problem solving at business level. You can think at this as a platform similar to Topcoder, which is not crodwsourcing the design and development of applications, but ideas. That means that an employee can submit an idea on this platform to find out what his colleagues think about it. His peers can vote his idea or add comments to it to show their appreciations and the employee can get points based on a reward system.  Once a decision maker sees the traction such an idea got, he can approve it for implementation.  Here’s a video recording to explain you more about this.

Features
We are not highlighting specific screens, as we are looking for your ideas and how you approach the problem. The below requirements MUST be incorporated into your design somehow.

• A user should be able to submit his idea either logged in with his credentials or in anonymous mode
• When he submits an idea he should select a category type for it (for eg.: process improvement, new food item, new technology, etc.),  post his idea title free (just the description) and be able to attach an image
• We’d like to see tutorials/videos on how the platform works and hints on different sections to help the user onboard
• The platform should have a reward based system for members to get points based on specific criterias (for eg.: number of times you interact with the system, number of votes your idea gets,etc)
• Live map view that is updated real time to show the progress of the submitted idea
• Any other ideas you find useful

Apart from this details the customer provided additional documentation for this challenge, to give you a better understanding of the requirements. You should go over them to make sure you take into accounts all aspects of this application. In addition to this, we would like you to push the ideas you see there even more and give design direction to them.

Here are a couple references (created by Blake Walles) for the type of fidelity and design direction we are looking for. The elements that we would like to see included in submission are:

• Overall concept description
• Your wireframes/ screens with name and a short description to explain what that page is about. Your screens should be organized in the order you would like them to be seen.
• Overall application style: how do you envision this application being designed? Should it be modern, retro, high0-tech, dark style, etc. You can add notes with links to other applications/designs from the web to show the look and feel. (Do you provide a sigle page design treatment along with your wireframes)
• Your suggested color palette and image treatment/ theme
• Your suggested typography style (2-3 fonts recommendation)
• Your suggested icon style
• For ALL choices, we would like a comment or explanation.
• For this challenge you can use the Form wireframe GUI KIT , from Invision attached in the forums, to get you going so you can focus on providing great design direction to the customer that will be used in the follow-up design challenge.
• Place your design in a desktop mockup like in the reference we provided so it gives a more authentic image of how the concept might look. You can find the mockups of the devices in the GUI KIT. You can also use the Marvel app to showcase your work.

Deliverables Examples
-    We want to make this challenge easy and fast, therefore we are not setting strict requirements on the format of the deliverables you produce. We are recommending you think of how it is presented. So a complete PDF of your design direction or Axure wireframes or a MarvelApp would make sense. Anything that showcases your ideas the best (and makes it easy to follow).
-     Make sure to provide all source files as usual created in Adobe PS, AI, XD, Sketch, etc. and all submission files
-    If you decide to use Marvel Prototype     

• Please send your marvel app request to keyla.blue1@gmail.com
• You MUST include your Marvel app URL as a text file in your final submission labeled “MarvelApp URL” (in your marvel app prototype, click on share and then copy the link).

-    The target device is desktop

Target Audience

• Customer’s employees
• Business partners
• Any one who works with the customer's company and wants to find out a solution / come up with new ideas

Judging Criteria
Your submission will be judged by:

• Execution of your deliverables
• The usefulness of the deliverables as it relates to the requirements and UI challenge
• The thoughtfulness of the deliverables

Stock
-    Stock photography is allowed in this challenge. See this page for more details.
-    Stock icons are allowed in this challenge
-    Stock Wireframe kits (copyright free/free usage) are allowed in this challenge