Design Challenge 2023: Transparent UX

Winners

Gold:  Live.Lingo, Athena Vo (Boston College, USA), thuydungvo3095@gmail.com – submission at View Gold winner

Silver: MCCD Form, Nomeshwari Reddy Thummala (National Institute of Design, Bengaluru, India), thummala_n@nid.edu- submission at View Silver Winner
There is no Bronze Award. However, we have decided to award an honorable mention.

Honorable Mention: Optimens, Federica Masci (KU Leuven), federica.masci@kuleuven.be – submission atView honorable mention

In 2022 we refocused the Design Challenge (DC) to support the World Usability Initiative (WUI) goal of improving understanding of how a focus on users and usage leads to improved designs. As a first objective, WUI seeks UN recognition through including World Usability Day (WUD) in its calendar. Beyond this, WUI aims to inform policy at the highest international levels. The WUI DC supports this aim through its potential to bring examples of best practice to the attention of international policy makers and to develop a strong public understanding of the benefits of user focused design practices.

For the WUI 2023 Design Challenge, we maintain this focus on evidence of specific impacts of insights from user research and evaluation on detailed design decisions. Human-Centred Design (HCD) approaches have been followed for decades, with much success. However, they are not always effective. Several explanations for this are possible, but all must involve an inability to fully exploit the potential benefits of research into target usage contexts and evaluation of designs in use. A significant obstacle for teams new to HCD, and for those considering adopting it in practice or education, is a lack of clear examples of how detailed design work specifically benefits from insights from contextual research and usage evaluation.

Design Challenge Details
For 2023, we seek submissions to the WUI DC that showcase excellent user-focused design for a general audience. Submitted entries will present evidence of user research and evaluation that had a clear valuable impact on interaction, product and/or service design recommendations and decisions. Such evidence should let the general public (including UN decision makers) ‘get it’ by clearly demonstrating connections between research, evaluation, and worthwhile design outcomes.

For 2023, entries will be tightly argued and well evidenced reports that provide details of user research and evaluations with compelling details on how this demonstrably improved both product and process value. Entries can address the WUD 2023 theme, Collaboration and Cooperation (https://worldusabilityday.org/2023-theme-collaboration-and-collaboration/) but this is not a requirement. Winning entries will clearly demonstrate how a combination of contextual user research and evaluation of quality in use have 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.

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

Prizes and Recognition
The WUI DC is in collaboration 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 winners will be cordially invited, with complimentary registration, to present their innovative, impactful design work in a special session during the 2024 HCI International Conference. They will 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 2022, 2021 and 2020.

 

Submission Guidelines

THE WUI Design challenge is open to everyone. Previous award winners have been both individuals and groups, and also both students and practitioners. Winning entries will be those that are most transparent in their demonstration of how user research and usage evaluation greatly improved design quality and usage outcomes.

The evaluation criteria below 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.

Evaluation Criteria and Process

Four 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.

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 and why research and evaluation were carried out.

Connections between user-focused work and design decisions

What were the implications of research discoveries and 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 apparent “creative leap” 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 directed (re)design decisions. Ideally, the validity of earlier implicit design connections will be demonstrated through later evaluation activities.

The evaluation process will begin with an initial triage by small groups of judges who will decide on which entries should or could proceed. Entries that have not adequately addressed the evaluation criteria above will not be considered further after this point. The second round of judging will reduce the entries to those that can, given their relative quality, be realistically considered for an award or an honorable mention. Several honorable mentions have been given in previous WUI design challenges.

In the third and final round of judging, the remaining entries will be ranked to decide on award winners and honorable mentions. Overall, there will be two rounds of elimination followed by a final ranking round. Judges will make explicit reference to the evaluation criteria above in all their deliberations and discussions. Equal weight will be given to each of the four criteria. However, the deciding criteria in past competitions have been the last two, i.e.,

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

Entrants are advised to ensure that they address both these criteria thoroughly. The submission page has example award winners from previous years for reference and comparison. Please note that the standards of winning entries and honorable mentions have improved substantially each year.

WUI Design Challenge Jury
The judges for 2023 are:

Gilbert Cockton (Jury Chair, UK): Emeritus Professor of Design (Northumbria University) and Computer Science (University of Sunderland), and external research mentor to Teesside University’s Centre of Culture and Creativity (covering Arts, Design, Media, and Humanities). He has published on Design Research and Evaluation since 1995, co-managing two large European research networks from 2004-2013 (MAUSE, TwinTide). For the decade before that, his publications were mostly on software design and engineering for interactive systems. Gilbert was awarded the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award in 2020.

Ticianne Darin (Brazil): tenured Professor of Systems and Digital Media Federal (University of Ceará – UFC, Brazil), where she teaches courses and supervises and conducts research in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Digital Games, and Interactive Digital Design. Ticianne is a member of the Steering Committee of the CEIHC (special Human-Computer Interaction Committee) within the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC). She has published in HCI and UX proceedings and journals since 2012 and co-authored the book “Interação Humano-Computador e Experiência do Usuário” (Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience).

Jonathan Fraser (Europe and Middle East/UK): leader of the EMEA CX Practice at Mach49, where he leads a team of UX designers and researchers to help clients build new ventures that drive meaningful growth, by combining a deep understanding of customer needs with commercial rigour and delivery knowhow. His background is a mix of engineering and design with Masters in Engineering from the University of Cambridge and a Double Masters in Innovation Design Engineering from the Royal College of Art and Imperial college London.

 

Hussein Gaber (Egypt): Head of product design and UX Consultant at Tremoloo, he has been simplifying web and mobile experiences since 2012. He is UX Master Certified (UMC®) by NN/g, the world leading UX firm.

Zhenghie Liu (China): Professor Emeritus of HCI/UXD at Dalian Maritime University (DMU), has working in HCI since 1989 as a pioneer and has especially helped the development of UXD practice in industry in China. He founded Sino European Usability Centre in 2000 as the first research centre dedicated to user experience in China. He has served international HCI/UXD communities in various committees, including for ACM SIGCHI, IFIP TC.13 Committee on HCI and ISO WGs for HCI relevant standards. Zhengjie was awarded the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award in 2017.

Sharon McDonald (UK): a visiting professor at Scotland’s University of Abertay, previously professor of HCI, University of Sunderland, now working freelance for the Government Digital Service, where she led user research for the cost-of-living team, who developed tools to help people access government support. She currently leads research on the Priority Response and Campaigns team, who are redefining the process of how gov.uk responds to crisis and priority events.   She also works on the AI and search team, who are exploring how Large Language Models might be used.

Stavroula Ntoa (Greece): a postdoctoral researcher at the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Laboratory of the Institute of Computer Science of the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (ICS-FORTH, Crete), where she leads the HCI laboratory’s UX research and (accessible) design activities. She has expertise in UX design and evaluation in several contexts and application domains, including responsive web, big data, mobile, intelligent, and X-reality applications. Her research focuses on adaptive and intelligent interfaces, universal access and accessibility of modern interactive technologies, and UX research in AI environments.

Eunice Sari (Indonesia and Australia): CEO and Co-Founder of UX Indonesia, the first insight-driven UX Research, Training, and Consulting Company based in Indonesia since 2002, and co-founder of Customer Experience Insight Pty Ltd (Australia), with over 20 years of experience in academia and industry in digital transformation and innovation. A Google Certified Design Sprint Master, a Google Mentor for Google Startups, Google Women Techmakers Ambassadors and a Google Developer Group – Perth Organiser, Dr. Sari was the first Asian female Google Developer Expert in Product Design and Strategy and Strategy.

Brian K Smith (Jury Vice-Chair USA): Associate Dean of Research in Boston College’s School of Education and Human Development, formerly Dean at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and Drexel University (Computer Science). Brian started as a computer scientist focusing on artificial intelligence before transitioning into designing computer-based environments to support learning in and outside of schools. UI/UX has been central to that work, and I’ve had the privilege to work with great students on fun design projects at several universities, including MIT Media Lab, Penn State, RISD, and Drexel.