Calling all Creatives! Topcoder Challenge Page Design Concept Challenge

Welcome to the "Topcoder Challenge Details Concepts Design Challenge". We are running this exploratory challenge to see your ideas about the challenge details page that you use on an everyday basis, so we can provide the community (including you) with all the information you need in the best possible ways to help you perceive the data and be able to make informed decisions regarding a challenge. 

This challenge will run as a one-round challenge for 3 weeks. Each participant will have a chance to get feedback twice during 2 sets of rolling checkpoints. Please note, that submitting for checkpoints is not mandatory, though you can use the feedback to fine-tune your final submission. We are not giving away checkpoint prizes this time, instead we will announce 4 winners.
- 1st checkpoint deadline: 29 January 2020, 9:00 am EST
- 2nd checkpoint deadline: 5 February 2020, 9:00 am EST
 

We would like to inform you that we have just been upgraded to Marvel 3, which means that project assigning might take slightly longer. Please, don't leave your Marvel requests to the last minute as you might miss the deadlines! Thanks.

Challenge Objectives

• Revamp Topcoder’s challenge details page(s)
• A single desktop screen with different states
• Only desktop designs in 1366px width

Project Background

• Topcoder - being conscious about their members' needs - would like to keep up with the trends and would like to satisfy the possibly changing needs of competitors on all tracks concerning the presentations of challenge details. 
• We would like you to research the topic, checking out other crowdsourcing actors of the market, like Upwork, Devpost, Challenge.gov, etc. How they provide their audience the information about the problems they are about to tackle and what ways they offer to interact with those challenges?
• We also opened a discussion forum for all the members across all tracks to let them share their ideas, wishes, pain points. Please consider this as a user research and analyse the findings when creating your solution.

Objectives of the New Challenge Details Page

• We would like our challenge details page to provide quickly digestible and actionable information for all tracks’ competitors.
• With the redesign of the challenge details page, we would like to make it easy for new members to start competing by removing any friction that is present in the process.
• In this challenge we are looking for your ideas, concepts, so feel free to tackle all the pain points you might have and provide your dream solution. We are planning to run a follow-up challenge that will be more production focused. 
• We would like to use the same design for all tracks with modularity in place, so the different challenges can still be differentiated from each other according to track specific needs (different timelines, different prize structures, different assets and input).

Design Considerations
This time you have a fairly easy task to be able to think about goals, needs, wants and pain points of the target audience as you are one of them. We give you

• What are the most important things you would like to see when you open the challenge page?
• What would be the differences between a logged-in state and a logged out state?
• What items are actionable?
• Is there any section of the current page that you don’t look at ever? Why is that? Could these sections contain important information?
• We would like to use the same structure for all the tracks, however, do you think that they should be differentiated more?
• Any 3rd party integration you would like to see (e.g. Marvelapp, GitHub, GitLab, etc.)?
• How to make the page usable for both new and experienced users, without avoiding them losing any important inputs?
• Don't feel restricted by what we have now on the challenge details page. The purpose of this challenge is ideation, so feel free to prepare what you think is the ideal form.

Screen/Function Requirements
We would like you to provide the revamped challenge details screen and all the states, interactions you think would be useful for our users. Note: you only need to keep the global navigation and footer, all the other content/design is up to you. Below we list some content that you might want to include, but don’t let yourself be limited by these, as we are open to your suggestions.

• Challenge name
• Track and technologies tags
• TCO eligibility
• Prize structure
• Registrants
• Links to forums, rules, FAQ
• Submission CTA
• Banners, images, THRIVE articles
• Name of copilot or customer (if applicable)
• 140 character tagline for the challenge for marketing purposes
• Etc.

Challenge Assets
We provide some samples from our competitors in the forum. Please continue your research based on these.

Branding Guidelines
Please consider the below guidelines during your design process:

• You have to use the new Topcoder GUI kit for your design, which you can reach here and here.
• Please use the new navigation and footer from the GUI kit for your screens. The other regions on the screen are yours to create.
• Stock photos and stock icons are allowed from the approved sources, as long as you declare them.

Target Audience

• New and experienced Topcoder members throughout all the tracks we have
• Full time and part-time competitors
• Copilots, Challenge architects, Project Managers
• Clients

Judging Criteria
Your submission will be judged on the following criteria:

• How well you plan the user experience and capture your ideas visually.
• Overall idea and execution of concepts.
• How well you implement the challenge requirements.
• Creativity and ease-of-use is key to success as it must be engaging to users.
• Cleanliness of screen design and user flow.
• Out of the Box Thinking

Final Deliverables

• All original source files.
• Since this is ideation, we accept Adobe Photoshop and saved as a layered PSD file, Adobe Illustrator, Sketch or Adobe XD
• Marvel prototype

Marvel Prototype
We need you to upload your screens to Marvelapp.

• Please send your marvel app request to pere.viktoria@gmail.com
• To be able to showcase your design to the client please provide hotspots on your prototype.
• You MUST include your Marvel app URL in your declarations.txt (in your marvel app prototype, click on share and then copy the link).

Submission & Source Files
Final Deliverables
For submission you have to upload a zip file that contains the following 4 files:
 

• Source.zip – All original source files.

• Submission.zip – PNG/JPG files

• preview.png – Your preview image

• declarations.txt – All your declarations and notes