Winners Announced: socialmedian iphone application design contest

We are ready to announce the winners of the socialmedian iphone application design contest.

Designers were given 1 week to dream up and represent the ideal socialmedian user experience on the iphone.  We received 9 entries in the contest.  Each of the entries were really well done.  The typical entry contained more than 10 pages designed.  We are very thankful to all of the designers from around the world who put a lot of effort into the contest.

We have two prizes:
1.  A public vote.  Winner of the public vote will get $500 and a free iphone.
2.  socialmedian team judging.  Winner of the socialmedian team judging wil get $1000 and a free iphone.  Note:  If the socialmedian team independently chooses the same as the public vote, then there will just be a single winner of $1000 + a free iphone.

The Public Vote:

• The public vote took place here on socialmedian.  socialmedian users were asked to vote by leaving a public comment with their preferred choice.
  
• In all, 159 comments were left and more than 100 votes were tabulated.
  
• We noted in the rules on this page that we would only count "legit" votes by real socialmedian users.  This has turned out to be more of an art than a science.
• The results:  It is clear from the public vote that there are two designs that socialmedian users/voters prefer most:  Design #2 and Design #7.  The challenge came in determining which votes were from legit socialmedian users (who had been participating in socialmedian beyond just leaving this one comment) and which were just from people who only registered for the purpose of voting in this contest.  As it goes, if we tabulated the results one way, #2 would win, another way and #7 would win, another way #2, another way #7 -- we looked at it several ways. 
  
  So, here is what we have decided to do, and this decision is final.  The value of the prize for winning the public vote was $800.  We have decided to award both designs #2 and #7 as the co-winners of the contest and each will get a $400 prize.

Congratulations to Venkat Vejay and Adithya Ananth for winning the popular vote!

Entry #2:  Venkat Vijay
Short Bio:  I am a UCD practitioner for the past 4+ years and have a CUA from HFI recently as an Add-On since I am not from a Design school but learnt on the Job, have worked on Desktop, Web application, Web Site & Marketing+Branding for 5+ years in product company. Currently consulting and on the lookout for a interesting break!

Design sample:


Entry 7:  Adithya Ananth
Short Bio:  I am Adithya Ananth, a student of interface design and an aspiring interaction designer from National Institute of Design, India.  I am a computer science engineer as well. I am very keen on exploring new domains of interaction design, and news forms of input to computer systems.  I have been working on multitouch technology for the last one year.  My multitouch blog -> http://therealdesktop.blogspot.com/

Design sample:

And now for the grand prize winner.

As noted, the grand prize winner will receive $1000 + a new iphone 3G.  The grand prize winner was determined by a vote of the socialmedian employees.  Each employee got one vote.

The winner of the grand prize -- and it was by a wide margin -- is entry #3. 

Entry 3: Gajendra Agrawal
Short Bio:  Gajendra Agrawal is a User Interface Designer. After graduating from , IIT Guwahati in Design, he worked with one of India's major telecom providers. Currently he is working with a leading software product company in India. Gajendra's professional interests include social computing and information visualization and writing design reviews. Gajendra writes about design and usability on www.kicksandkisses.com.  Apart from design, he enjoys traveling and socializing. 

The socialmedian team was especially impressed with how Gajendra's design maintained the socialmedian clean and simple look and feel while preserving and enhancing the socialmedian functionality for the iphone.  We also thought that the shuffle pictoral view of news would be a lot of fun and very useful.

Here are Gajendra's winning designs.

 

Again, a big big thank you to all the designers who participated in the contest and to everyone who took time to review the designs and cast your vote.

We'll be launching a socialmedian iphone app soon!