Never rush to upload your submission to the UI Design Challenge page without evaluating your design first. Make it a habit to re-read the brief to make sure all the important things are not missed.
As frequently happens, designers feel that their designs are perfect according to the client’s needs. It is wrong to only rely on your own subjective opinion because the design could have many shortcomings as indicated by others.
The design that you make must solve the problems faced by the client. In this case, the design must have a good user experience and a beautiful interface. To achieve this, your design must go through several stages of evaluation.
I will explain various things about your design that should be evaluated before uploading your submission to the UI Design Challenge page.
Source: Aga Ciurysek
UI Design Challenges in the Topcoder Community always prioritize solving problems faced by clients, so you need a design that resolves client problems and also has a good user interface. The design that you create will be a medium of communication between clients and users, so create a balanced design between beauty (user interface) and usability (user experience).
Action: Make a list of all the problems contained in the brief so you can create UI / UX designs that meet client requirements. Try to not miss anything because it will affect the client’s assessment during the checkpoint session review. If you make a UI / UX design that does not meet client requirements, then you will lose the opportunity to get a checkpoint prize or the grand prize for the challenge.
Source: Victa Wille
You have to create a design that can convey a message to users in just seconds. This can be achieved by applying the visual hierarchy including focus points such as headlines, taglines, and illustrations in your design.
Action: Try to create a design layout that is balanced between content and white space, and provide striking colors and bold or large typography that help users to focus and quickly understand the message contained in the design.
Source: Eddie Lobanovskiy
The fatal mistake of a designer is to make the design style as he wants and not to follow the brand guidelines that have been included in the challenge specs. If that happens that clients will probably not like your design and ask you to follow the brand guidelines.
For example, if the target users of the design are business people or people who work in finance, then the designer must use an elegant and memorable corporate design style. If the target users are children or people who work in the arts, then they can use cheerful design styles and designs full of color.
Action: If the explanation in the brief contains information about the client’s website or company name, then you can explore who the target users of the company are via the internet. But, if the challenge brief contains only a pseudonym and give examples of information from similar companies, then you can search for information on the internet regarding the target users of a similar product. After knowing who the target market is, you can see references on dribbble or behance of design styles that are often used in or match those target markets.
Source: Eddie Lobanovskiy
The design that you make must contain elements that show the main functions and brands owned by the client, so that the design has characteristics that will always make the user remember that the design belongs to that particular client or company.
Expand your knowledge about the client company or the products offered by the client so that you can create designs that have characteristics according to the type of company or client’s brand.
Action: Include the client company’s logo and branding color in the design that you created. These things are usually summarized in the branding guidelines that have been included in the challenge brief. If there are no branding guidelines then you can see the company’s logo and branding on their official website and create the main elements of the design according to the branding that is characteristic of the company.
Source: Mike
It is very rare to find a design that is not inspired at all or takes several elements from an existing design. You should pay attention to avoiding copyright infringement such as using stock images or icons from sources that are not allowed in Topcoder.
If you are forced to take inspiration from other designs because it feels suitable to describe the solution to the problem, then you have to make modifications to elements, colors or layout that make your design different from the designs you have used as inspiration. This is so that your design is not considered an imitation of other people’s designs.
Action: Even though you are sure that you are not inspired by other people’s designs, check whether the design you created has a lot in common with an existing design. You can check it by entering the PNG / JPG file of your design into the Google image search and searching for similar images. Another way is to check manually on dribbble or behance with search keywords according to the field or theme of the design.
Finally, try to evaluate the design that you created before submitting it in the UI Design Challenge. This process aims to reduce misunderstandings between you and clients and will increase your chances of getting a checkpoint prize or the grand prize for the challenge. Hopefully this article will help you be more competitive on UI Design Challenges.