Homeschool Spanish Lessons - Online Learning

For our new interface for the upcoming new Spanish e-learning system for my sites (including this one), I realized from the get go that a fantastic design was essential. Easier navigation, lessons that are laid out on a weekly basis, and easy access to all features the system has to offer are all key.  Since I’m no real designer, I knew I had to find somebody a lot more talented to help build this vision of form and function! Well for function you have programmers. I probably think a little more like a programmer. I’m fascinated by what stuff can DO. I don’t like to hear the phrase “can’t be done” when it comes to programming, because in fact almost anything within the laws of nature CAN be done, it just takes time!

But design can be a bear. A big one. You just can’t look through a person’s fabulous portfolio, and know for sure they they can do a great job for you. I’ve seen many a great portfolio that translated into mediocre results for my own particular project. I think there are a few reasons for this.

1. who says that work is all theirs?
2. they might have had fantastic direction from the clients in their portfolio
3. they might not understand your product well enough
4. they might take your guidance TOO much
5. they might NOT take your guidance ENOUGH

I would say that after 10 years dealing with book and web publishing, graphic design has been the toughest thing to hire for; and I’ve had few experiences where I was truly happy with a design. Programmers? I’ve been so delighted with some of them that I’ve wanted to give them a huge BEAR HUG, the kind where you lift them off the ground! Designers? Caramba I usually wish I never met them.

Enter 99designs.com. There you can put a contest for $39, and if you put a good enough prize, and go about it in a smart way, you can have dozens of designers competing for your cash. You can set up 2 kinds of contests: pay only if you choose a winner, and guaranteed payment contests.

I’ve done 2 contests. Neither was guaranteed, but for my cheaper contest, I should have just forked the extra 10% to make it guaranteed, as it would have attracted more designers. For my $1250 contest I just wasn’t prepared to lose the money in the event that no good designer threw their hat in the ring. Then once a bunch of top notch designers did enter, I wasn’t willing to for the extra 10% to attract additional people.

Had I realized the quality of the people you can attract, I definitely would have made my cheaper contest guaranteed.  And even for the extra money, I probably would have gone that route with my bigger one too. But even with guaranteed, that doesn’t guarantee great designers. You can look through the contests on 99 Designs and see that some contests, despite a big bounty and being guaranteed, don’t seem to have attracted many designers.  I can’t say exactly why that is, but I’ll tell you what I did to get over 30 designers competing in mine, with over 150 total submissions so far.

• I gave them clear guidelines with examples
• I participated actively in the contest forum
• I sought out other designers via other contests, and invited them to join mine
• I gave feedback to every single submission
• I detailed what I did and didn’t like about each one
• I tried to encourage some people to do better by giving them a slightly higher rating

I’ve looked through a lot of contests, and seen that mine is certainly one of the robust large job contests on their entire site, of nearly 400 contests.  It’s easy getting 200 people to compete for a logo where you’re paying $500. It’s not so easy getting people to compete for a drawn out job such as a software interface where they will have to design a dozen or so screens, help convert to Flex, etc. So I’m quite proud of how this contest has gone, and I know that I never could have kept these designers interested if I hadn’t participated actively myself.

About 1/2 way through the contest I uploaded a couple of wireframes based on the best designs so far. I waited to do that, as I wanted to see what fresh ideas came in first. That’s the whole point of crowdsourcing :) But the wireframe mockups did seem to help narrow the designs to what I really wanted; an idea that only became firm during the contest itself.

There are a couple of days yet to go, but I think it’s really down to just 2 or 3 people at this point, and I’d be surprised if anything completely new pops up. But that’s ok by me! The hard part will be choosing between the finalists :)