What benefits do you get if you participate in UI design challenges in the Topcoder community? Of course there are big prizes, improvement of your design skills, connecting with other designers from all over the world, receiving important feedback from clients who can increase knowledge about the latest technology and designs, and building a design portfolio.
UI design challenges in the Topcoder community have tight deadlines so you must have a reliable method to create designs that contain solutions to problems faced by Topcoder clients in a limited amount of time.
In this article, I will explain various things about sprint design that you can use to compete in the Topcoder design challenges. You no longer have to worry about understanding the specs and competing with very tight deadlines.
The sprint design method has various benefits in the process of making a design product: you can reduce time and budget and immediately validate various ideas that emerge. This aims to provide additional time for future design improvements in the event of a failure. Because the design solution that you created is directly tested by the user or client, this will shorten the time and avoid misunderstandings between designers and clients.
The following are the five stages of sprint design that you can use in the UI design challenges in the TopCoder Community.
Try to read the challenge brief and understand every problem faced by clients, from their business goals, stakeholders, user needs and target markets. Write down the list of problems in the brief or the documentation provided by the client so that nothing is missed in the sprint design process.
Sprint design aims to avoid missing the main problems that the client faces. This factor can be the cause of your design not being selected as a winner because it does not provide a solution to the client’s problems.
Explore as many ideas as possible, both good and ordinary. Then choose the best idea that can solve all the problems in the challenge. Try to focus on the problems that have been outlined in the brief or documentation, do not widen the problems to those not contained in the brief. If there are indeed other problems that arise, then prioritize those that have urgency and ignore those that don’t have too much impact on the overall design.
Usually, new clarifications will be added in the checkpoint feedback after the client sees some design flow in round one. Make sure you don’t miss feedback at the checkpoint session and also read the feedback addressed to other designers, you can get enlightenment from there.
Combine all the best ideas that will be used as a solution in your design. At this stage, you must create a design in a high fidelity format so that clients can provide more detailed feedback. Before entering the prototype stage it is expected that you re-examine the designs made for whether there are still ideas that have not been delivered. This increases your chances of getting a $ 50 / $ 100 checkpoint bonus.
Always remember to create a UI design that is balanced between the beauty of the user interface and the usefulness of the user experience. The clients of Topcoder are various big companies that certainly need problem-solving in the form of UI design which shows the beauty in all its elements and good design in terms of user experience.
Import your design file into Marvelapp Prototype which has been provided by the copilot responsible for the challenge. Make the interaction between screen designs according to the idea you want to convey, this will help clients understand the solutions that you created. If necessary, add an explanation in the comments column available on each design screen.
Make sure you try every interaction that you have made because it could be that you will get enlightenment for a better design before uploading to the web page for the challenge. The client will use the hotspot that you created to be able to navigate and see all interactions in the design.
At this stage, you wait for the client to finish validating and making feedback for your design. This stage usually lasts several days because your design will be tested by many stakeholders at the company. Always be ready to monitor the challenge forum or email that will inform you that the review checkpoint process is complete. Next, you can refine your design according to the client’s feedback and then re-upload the revised design file to the challenge page. Finally, pray that your design is chosen as the winner of the challenge.
If you are chosen as a winner you might have to do a final fix, because during the selection of the winners the client will validate again like a checkpoint session. The client will choose the design that is closest to the goal of the design challenge and add small requirements for the winner to do so it meets their wishes 100%.
So what are you waiting for? Let’s use this method on the UI design challenges in the Topcoder community!