Summary

Did you design a vertical-market application that's great for, say, dentists, but you're tired of never having anybody but dentists see your work? Or did you design a mission-critical enterprise app that's making your company big bucks, but nobody outside the firm ever heard of it? It's time for the people who design great practical applications to share the limelight. Enter your work for the award. Winners will get substantial publicity and recognition from being honored in the Application Design Annual.

Eligible designs: Applications are defined as providing features, commands, and functionality, especially to the extent that they allow users to access or manipulate complex or mission-critical data. (Thus, we exclude pure-information websites and intranets where the only user commands are to navigate. We also don't consider games for this award.)

We welcome submissions of:

• Enterprise applications
• Vertical applications for narrow markets
• Web-based applications, including intranet-based apps
• Mobile applications
• PC-based apps, mainframe apps, client-server apps, or any other application architecture: this is a user experience award, so we will judge how the features are presented to the users, and how the user interface works, not how the functionality is implemented on the backend

Submission Guidelines

There are two parts to the initial submission:

1. information about the application design project and the people involved, and
2. screenshots of the user interface.

We will ask the top ten applications to answer more questions and to submit more screenshots. You will be notified in April if you are among the top ten applications selected.

We will publish a report with the screenshots from the winning applications as well as the information about their project and design process. We will also sometimes use the best screenshots in our conference presentations. Only submit material that you are willing to see published. The report will be read by tens of thousands of professionals, so being published is a major PR opportunity for the winners, but the broad readership means that you should not submit any confidential information.

We will never disclose the names or other information from the submissions that do not win — only the top ten will be in the report. Thus, this competition has no losers; only winners.

There is no fee to enter.

Part One: Information

Ideally, all text should be submitted in a MS Word document. Please provide the following information:

1. Name of the organization that developed the application
2. Name of the organization responsible for the design and usability of the user interface. (Was all work done in-house or were outside design or usability firms hired by the company?)
3. Names of people (usually designers) responsible for user interface design and usability
4. Job titles for those people
5. Contact name (that we can use to clarify any questions and follow up with.) For that person, please include an e-mail address, mailing address, and telephone number
6. Brief description (less than 200 words) of the organization, and if applicable, a short description of any outside design or usability firms
7. Where the organization headquarters is located
8. Short description (500-1,000 words) of the application. Please include:
   • Goal of the application
   • Basic features
   • Description of users it supports and the types of jobs they do. If possible, also include the approximate number of users it supports, and the geographic locations.
   • Description of user tasks it supports
   • Anything that makes the design particularly interesting or usable
9. Finally, briefly describe all screenshots included in part 2 of the submission (described below), and note the actual filename for easy reference.

Part Two: Screenshots

Please submit at least 8, but no more than 20 screenshots of the following screens or pages of the application:

1. The main page or home screen
2. The menus, icon palettes, or other area where users access commands
3. Examples of form or data entry area, if you have one
4. Example of data retrieval, sorting, filtering, or other handling of large datasets, if you support this
5. Examples of dialog boxes or other interactive elements requiring users to answer questions or select options
6. Examples of wizards or other hand-holding, if you provide this
7. Example of error messages and other error handling
8. Examples of online help, online documentation, or other user support, if provided
9. Examples of any interesting or innovative designs or features
10. If possible, please also submit several examples of the design before you made changes to improve usability (we will only score the current version, but knowing where it came from helps understand its benefits)

Each screenshot should be saved in a separate file. Please do not put pictures in a document or presentation file.

Describe all screenshots and reference the exact filename in the Information document. (See above.)

If the text in the screenshots is not in English, please also include an explanation of what the screens say. (You don't need to provide a full translation of everything, but do translate all important features and elements.)

Do not put callouts or captions on the screenshots themselves. Instead, place all descriptive text in the accompanying text file.

Name screenshot files so it is very easy to decipher what they are by the name. We prefer the following way:

CompanyName_#_ScreenDescription_Version.tif

where "#" is a serial number that's incremented by 1 for each of your screenshots.

For example, if your company name is ACME, and you submit a screenshot of the homepage for a live application, and two previous versions of the design, you would save these in three separate graphic files, and name them this:

• Acme_1_home_live.tif
• Acme_2_home_version1.tif
• Acme_3_home_version2.tif

Only send us screenshots that you are happy to have reproduced in the report if you win. Please replace any confidential information from the screenshots with dummy text.

Screenshots should be populated with realistic data, so that they look the way a real user would encounter them while doing real work. It is OK to dummy up the data with fake information if the application is used to process confidential matters, just as long as the pretend data looks the same as the real data (i.e., same number of records, same complexity of information, same types of names and labels, etc.).

Sending Entries

When e-mailing the submission, please:

• Compress all files into a single ZIP file before mailing them.
• Keep e-mail attachments to 5 MB or smaller, to get through our mail servers. Multiple e-mails are fine, as long as they are labeled as such.
• To avoid spam killers, use this subject line for your email message: Application submission: your-company-name

Please send parts 1 and 2 of the submission (described above) by e-mail to:

> John Berger at Nielsen Norman Group:

Deadline: February 29, 2008.

You will hear from us to confirm your entry was received. (If you don't hear within 48 hours, please follow up with a brief email to ensure we received it.)

We will contact the winners in April for additional information for the report and to set up interviews with the members of the design team to give them a chance to get personal quotes and experiences published.

> Day 1: Page-Level Building Blocks for Feature Design
> Day 2: Dialogue and Workflow Design
at the Usability Week 2008 conference (New York, San Francisco, London, and Melbourne)

Also available as an in-house seminar at your company.

We can conduct a usability review of your application.