We know you are all anxious to hear who the winners are, so let’s cut to the chase:

Note: We received many entries which had visual designs. Visual design was NOT one of the goals and does not feature in our evaluation matrix.

First Place – Techved Design

This design was the most complete and scored the most points in our final tally (the scoring matrix and methodology is described below).  The home page was well structured and created a lot of motivation and engagement upfront.  The IA was clean and all tasks were well presented.  There were some assumptions made by the designer – for instance – voting cannot occur during an ongoing competitions.

All-in-all we believed this was the best submission.  Congratulations to the winner!

Second Place – zdmedia

In a very tight race, the second place entry goes to zdmedia.  There were some interesting and innovative feature ideas here, like the way the submissions were presented in a gallery format and just the right amount of information was presented for each one. We also liked the structure of the homepage it created enough engagement for visitors by showing recent and popular items.

It lost marks on the fundamental aspects like navigation and visual hierarchy. Some of the tasks too seemed a bit difficult/confusing to accomplish.

Third Place
This was a tough one, we ended up having a tie for third place. Both will receive the full third place prize

Third Place (1) – Abhishek Thakker

The most simple and minimal UI entry we received. Clear action oriented navigation supporting the most common and important tasks.  We also enjoyed the thought process that was described and use of personas.

The only thing this entry lacked was a sense of completion and a bit more detailing of the actions a user can take on a specific screen.

Third Place (2) – Sheetal Elango

Awesome visual design for the home page! we really loved this. having said that, we felt it was not engaging enough for a contest website. The inside pages have a persistent navigation but the home page almost looked like a static content website and not an active community driven competition.

Deeper into the website, it supported most user tasks elegantly.  The IA was also very well structured.

Honorable Mentions

Swati Gupta

This was complete and very well thought website – technically correct IA and navigation, but lacking in innovation.

With a bit more pizazz, this could have easily become one of the top 3!

Judging Panel

Anirudha Joshi – faculty member,  Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay.
Ninad Raval – Manager, User Experience Design, Directi.
Rameshwar Soni – Interaction Designer, Directi.

Scoring metrics and methodology
With guidance from Mr. Joshi, we prepared a set of goals for the UX competition. We gave each goal a certain weightage and then rated all entries on these goals and how well each submission fared.

Once all of us filled out the score sheet, we averaged out the scores and arrived at the final 4. We then discussed each one of these and went into details of what we liked and didn’t like.  The choice of top 3 was decided upon by all judges mutually.

All entries had something or the other interesting about them and gave us different perspectives.

We learned a lot about our audience and how to effectively judge a UX competition.  We would love to hear your feedback, in terms of what you thought and how the contest and how we could improve it for next time.

Thank you all again.  Stay tuned for details on our next competition.

Thanks,

Ninad Raval
Manager, User Experience Design, Directi.

First Place – jukeboxdesign

We loved the Chef part of the design – classy, nice font, cool concept. While we selected this as the winner, we would have loved to see an additional design element in the first half of the logo (and change the colors). We would like to give some feedback to the designer and work with them to come up with a final design.

Second Place – pinksoda

Simple and elegant. This could be a logo for anything though, doesn’t tie in the Chef theme (not necessarily a bad thing). Well done!

This was a really tough one for us and we ended up having a tie for third place. Both will receive the full third place prize.

Third Place (1) – studio6t9

We loved the color scheme – very original. The coffee stain concept was great too, only problem was the “d” wasn’t that recognizable.

Third Place (2) – saarthi

Without knowing why we all really loved this design! It’s very fun and creative (sometimes less is more)!

Honorable Mentions

There were a few other designs that were great but didn’t make the final cut. We’d like to highlight some of our other favorites as well (in no particular order).

zigndog

Colors are awesome. Isn’t a great logo though, at a small size, wouldn’t be very recognizable. Font could be improved.

The mustache favicon is incredible. Best favicon out of the bunch. Colors/Chef’s Hat/Font needs some work…

harshalpanchakshari

Clear recognizable logo, unfortunately something feels missing. Execution was very clean – nicely done.

sunilvp22

If this wasn’t an out of the box font (Sketch Rockwell), this logo might’ve won.

archys187

Very fun design. All of this designer’s submissions were creative and used different concepts. Nice Job!

mallikag

This would be an awesome poster, great concept though not great for a logo.

nomics

Well executed, proportions were a little off though. Really nice!

cod3rs

Totally rockin’ design! Unfortunately a little off-topic.

There were certainly other great designs that were submitted but unfortunately we could only recognize a few. Thank you all for your participation. We had a lot of fun with this and hope you did too.

Stay tuned for future contests. UX results will take a few more hours…
Cheers,
The Chef

We will be announcing the winners on the 5th. If you have any feedback regarding the contest, please let us know!
Cheers,
The Chef

Submissions will be closed on August 1st at 11:59pm.  The winners will be announced by August 5th at midnight.  We already know that there are many deserving winners and that the choice of the actual winner will be extremely difficult to determine.  We will send out an announcement of the winners as an email to all the entrants, as well as make a post on this blog.

We plan on holding regular competitions in the future, but we will need some time to implement the new design and user experience, please bear with us for a few weeks until we can get the site up and running again.

We would like everyone to help us make the site better by answering a few questions:

• What types of competitions would you like to see in the future?
• Do you have any recommendations in terms of who should be on the judging panel?
• Should we be giving away cash or prizes?
• Any other feedback that we can use to improve the site?

Please let us know in the comments below or feel free to email us at feedback@designchef.com.  Thank you all again, stay tuned for an update on winners.

Cheers,
The Chef