Post Image

The Judges Have Spoken — We Have A Winner in Our First Design Challenge!

Ben Gremillion
By Ben Gremillion on 30th September, 2015 Updated on 22nd April, 2020

We’re pleased to announce the winners of our first Design Challenge. Congratulations to Alina Kononenko for her redesign of the De-bug website! She’s won an Apple Watch Sport, the competition’s grand prize.

Second place goes to Suganya Yuvaraj. In third place is Liz Coppinger.

The designers had to redesign Silicon Valley De-bug’s website, using current brand assets, content and organization in UXPin. The catch: it had to be done with a mobile-friendly slant!

As a tech-savvy community organization and entrepreneurial collective, De-bug needs a responsive website to better serve their community. We’re thrilled with the design community’s response and dedication in helping the organization achieve their goals in social justice and rights for youth, workers, immigrants and those impacted by the criminal justice system.

The winners were chosen by a panel of judges, which included our own CEO Marcin Treder, True Ventures Design Partner and UXPin advisor Jeff Veen, and name of debug Adrian Avila. So without further ado, let’s take a look at the winning designs.

Before:

image02

The First-Place Winner: Alina

First-place winner

While learning to program, Alina realized that design part of any program gave her much more pleasure than coding.

She began to study anew, and every small success pushed her to move forward. The more about design she learned, the more excited she became about designing user interfaces. The constant search of beauty, discovering something new and upgrading my skills, inspires her in her daily work.

She explains her rationale behind her design choices:

The main idea of my design was to make it dynamic and balanced at the same time.

From the side of UX, I wanted to make informational structure more clear to allow users to have fast access to all Silicon Valley De-bug projects and its main information. Also, another task was to make this design mobile-friendly, so current layout can be easily adopted for all the possible devices.

Big attention also was given to call to donate, there is separate section on the site that explains the purpose of donation and engages potential donors. From the side of UI, I decided to make clean and encouraging design that will be consistent with existing style guide and will inspire people to collaborate with Silicon Valley De-bug.

Congratulations to Alina, who took the Apple Watch in the contest. But hers wasn’t the only design that resonated with our panel of judges.

Second Place Runner-Up: Suganya

2nd place runner-up Suganya shared her insight:

I wanted to present the maximum content in my single page design because user may find it difficult to coordinate and understand the info if there are too many redirects(links which open in separate page/browser tab).

Information grouping was not much difficult to me because in Silicon Valley Debug’s ‘About Us’ web page information was well grouped but the design was not pleasing enough for an end user. I just conveyed the same info with latest 3 grid design.

Silicon Valley Debug is a non-profit organization and so it requires Donate feature to be highlighted and given more significance to. So i embedded it in the banner as a button ‘Join us for a Cause’ and also dedicated a space in layout for donate and fund-raising.

In a nutshell, I just thought as an end-user, whatever I felt less pleasing in the existing Silicon Valley De-bug page, I changed them as user friendly design and incorporated latest design trend in it.

Third Place Runner-Up: Liz

Third-place winner

And 3rd place runner-up Liz, who’s written on her design process before. A Business Analyst with Lucid Agency, Liz started wireframing and learning about UX design four years ago. She’s driven the UX design for major corporate intranets, email templates, front-end websites, and strategic landing pages.

She said she’s inspired by the nature of digital work itself. Over the short span of four years, she’s seen many things change, not the least of which is the introduction of responsive design.

I thought the biggest issue with the existing [De-bug] site was the information architecture. My main goal for the design was to create a layout that clearly outlined the three main sections of SVDB before calling out specific successes.

Because SVDB was seeking higher conversion rates for donations, I highlighted ‘donation’ calls to action with design and placement. I also wanted to try adding a suggested amount below the donation button.

The First of Many Design Challenges!

Thanks to everyone who entered our first Design Challenge. We look forward to conducting more competitions, seeing what the creative design community invents, and handing out more prizes.

If you found this post interesting, check out our free e-book Timeless UX Trends: Responsive & Adaptive Design. We describe in step-by-step detail how to follow a mobile-first design approach with analysis of examples from Hulu, Change.org, and others. It’s written for everyday design, so you won’t find any dry theory.

Download a free e-book

Still hungry for the design?

UXPin is a product design platform used by the best designers on the planet. Let your team easily design, collaborate, and present from low-fidelity wireframes to fully-interactive prototypes.

Start your free trial

These e-Books might interest you