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Redesign the HCII Website! $1,300 in Prizes

News

  • What: Challenge to redesign the HCII website
  • Due: February 15, 2012
  • Prizes: $1,000 first prize and $300 second prize

The Human-Computer Interaction Institute website is showing its age and needs a facelift or more serious redesign. Since we are the premiere HCI program in the country, our students are the best qualified to do this redesign.

The HCII faculty challenge HCII students or alumni – individually or in teams – to redesign our site. We will award a $1,000 prize for the best redesign and $300 for the second best, as judged by a panel of faculty.

Your redesign proposal should include high fidelity mock-ups of at least four important pages including the home page, an information architecture showing how pages will be organized, a brief (approximately 2-page) overview of your design describing your main goals and innovations, and as much annotation as needed to allow the judges to understand your design and developers to build it. We’ll expect you to field questions from developers as the site is being rebuilt. The current HCII site is powered by the Drupal content management system, so we prefer a site that can be easily rendered in Drupal, but working in Drupal isn't a requirement.

At a minimum, the new site must provide access to the current content, but we are open to proposals for important new content as well (e.g., blogs, alumni bios). The redesign should address the needs of two types of visitors – students and faculty who are already at CMU and students and others who might want to join us. Google Analytics data from the current site are available to help you understand what different types of visitors find important. Some of our major competitors are University of Michigan’s School of Information, programs in Interactive Computing and HCI at Georgia Tech, the HCI program and the d-school at Stanford, the Human-Computer Interaction and Design at the University of Washington and MIT’s Media Lab.

This challenge is open only to HCII students and alumni. To register for this challenge send an email to <kraut+redesign@cs.cmu.edu> with your contact information. To submit your redesign, send an email to <kraut+redesign@cs.cmu.edu> with a URL by Feb 14, 2012 pointing to your redesign mock-ups and rationale document.

Contact Robert Kraut <kraut+redesign@cs.cmu.edu> for questions.