The Blog

There is only one week left to enter the Interaction Awards! Submit your work today, before the submissions close on Monday, October 1 at 11:59pm. Need some inspiration? Here are four pointers on creating your entry from one of last year’s winners!

Guest post by Bas Bijpost, Senior Interaction Designer at ICEMOBILE

Before we submitted our winning entry for Appie (Best in Category Optimizing) for the 2012 Interaction Awards, we didn’t really have a plan of attack, nor any experience with submitting work for interaction design awards. I’ve tried to identify what I think we did right, and have a couple of pointers which hopefully help you build a great case.

Focus your story
Condensing months or years of work into a few paragraphs, a couple of images and a 2 minute video is not easy. Getting it right is important, though. Focus on the uniqueness of the problems faced, the solutions created, the process followed, and the resulting impact. Imagine talking to a fellow interaction designer who’s never heard of your creation. What would excite him or her about your project?

In fact, stop imagining, go out there, and find real peers to discuss your work with. Identify what they respond to, what inspires them about your project, and build your story around that.

Don’t say the same thing 3 times
As with any design problem, each medium has its own merits. You have text, images and video available to you to help you create a compelling case. Try not to repeat yourself too much across these media, but use them to complement each other where possible.

Know your own limitations
You can’t possibly think to write a submission, create the images, and shoot and edit a video all by yourself. Just because you’re a great interaction designer, doesn’t mean you can write a clear case or create an engaging video. Make sure you’ve got a few people with the right skills to help you out. If you work in an agency or similar organization, make sure you get plenty of resources and time to work on your submission.

Let the results do the talking
Say you developed an iPhone and Android app, which is downloaded 1.2 million times and used by 300,000 people every day. For an American peer or jury member, that might not sound very spectacular. But if you live in country where only 2.4 million people own an Android or iPhone device, things start to look a lot more interesting. It means that 50% of all potential users has downloaded your app, and 1 in 4 of those use it on a daily basis. Not bad, eh?

Don’t forget to complete your entries by Monday, October 1 at 11:59pm. Be recognized among the best interaction design this year!