Design Challenge 2025: Emerging Technologies and Human Experience

“Design is as much a matter of finding problems as it is solving them.” — Bryan Lawson

This year’s World Usability Day theme asks us to consider how emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and immersive interfaces transform human interactions with digital systems and environments. As these innovations rapidly evolve, it is crucial to prioritize the human experience: How do we design to ensure user privacy, build robust trust mechanisms, and maintain human-centered design principles? By thoughtfully integrating technological advancements with ethical considerations, we can create digital experiences that are powerful and innovative and respect and promote human dignity. As Bryan Lawson mentions, it is just as—arguably, more—important to imagine problems that enhance the human experience as it is to solve them with emerging technologies.

The WUI Design Challenge continues to call on the design community to share evidence of specific impacts of insights from user research and evaluation on detailed design decisions. A focus on users in design is primarily supported through research into target usage contexts and evaluation of designs in use. For 2025, we seek submissions showcasing excellent user-focused design that addresses the theme of Emerging Technologies and Human Experience. Submitted Design Challenge entries will present evidence of user research and evaluation that had a clear and valuable impact on interaction, product and/or service design recommendations and decisions. Such evidence should help the public (including UN decision-makers) ‘get it’ by demonstrating connections between research, evaluation, and worthwhile design outcomes.

Winners will be announced on World Usability Day, November 13, 2025. The WUI DC collaborates with the HCI International (HCII) conference, which sponsors three awards (Gold $1250, Silver $1000, and Bronze $750). The Gold, Silver, and Bronze recipients of the WUI DC Awards will be cordially invited, with complimentary registration, to present their innovative, impactful design work in a special session during the 2026 HCI International Conference. They can also have a written account included in the proceedings as a paper or late-breaking results (with a later deadline for their manuscript).

Award Winners and Honorable Mentions will be recorded on this web page, along with previous winners and mentions from 2020-2024 (see below).

For 2025, entries should be tightly argued and well-evidenced reports that provide details of user research and evaluations with compelling evidence of how this demonstrably improved both product and process value. Entries should address the WUD 2024 theme, Emerging Technologies and Human Experience. Winning entries will demonstrate how a combination of contextual user research and evaluation of quality in use has significantly contributed to the (improved) success of a digital product or service. The goal is to promote the value of user focus and how this complements other design activities such as aesthetics, product strategy, software quality, or performance engineering.

The judging criteria will be applied to the information provided in each entry. They are:

• Quality of contextual/user research
• Quality of UX/outcomes evaluation
• Explicitness of connections between user-focused work and design decisions
• Quality of evidence for connections between user-focused work, design decisions, and outcomes.

Criteria will be evidenced by a submitted report of up to 10,000 words (excluding tables and figures) with links to video or other internet content as appropriate. The submission form also asks for short summaries of the research, evaluation, and the impact of each. We expect to see the following when assessing submissions:

Quality of Contextual/User Research 

What research was carried out and when in relation to the overall development process? Why was it carried out? What methodology was followed? How was this appropriate given available resources and project goals? What were the key discoveries and insights?

Quality of Evaluation of UX and Usage Outcomes 

What evaluation was carried out and when in relation to the overall development process? Why was it carried out? What methodology was followed? How was this appropriate given available resources and project goals? What were the key discoveries and insights?

A process diagram for the project can be used to indicate when research and evaluation were carried out.

Connections between user-focused work and design decisions

What were the implications of research discoveries, insights, and evaluation results for the envisaged/current design? How did (re)design decisions relate to these discoveries, insights, and results? What were these decisions? What would have happened without these discoveries and insights? How explicit can you be about the connections between user-focused work and design decisions? Which decisions were based on clear implications? Which set a general direction without implying a specific design decision? Which were creative leaps that were inspired by insights?

Appropriate design representations (e.g., wireframes, workflows, conceptual models) can provide necessary detail on (re)design decisions.

Quality of evidence for connections between user-focused work, design decisions, and outcomes.

We do not expect all connections to be explicit. For implicit connections, various forms of creative leaps are expected and legitimate, but they must be argued to depend on discoveries, insights, and evaluation results. For explicit connections, we expect to see clear rationales for how discoveries, insights, and evaluation results direct (re)design decisions. Ideally, the validity of earlier implicit design connections will be demonstrated through later evaluation activities.

Winning entries will not be merely user-focused or user-centered but user-soaked, because they are saturated with transformative understandings of who uses a digital artifact, how and why they use it, and how they benefit from it.

The Design Challenge will open to entries in May 2025. Submissions are due on or before September 19, 2025.

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