Disappointed - My opinion

Hello All

As the person that does select challengers and runs Design Challenges, I am very invested in this thread. I appreciate you thinking about this on my behalf. You all have echoed conversations we have had within the e14 Team and within the Top Member circle.

To address some of your recommendations and questions, I can confirm that when checking applications we first check them for originality, and we do select the best applications based on a few sets criteria.

I personally do get disheartened when some people ghost on us... even more when their proposed application was fantastic.

I also understand that some people have better technical and practical skills than written English skills and try to keep an open mind on this when selecting challengers. Every challenger I accept represents a project I would like to see brought into the world and is most likely off the back of a convincing application.

We do track blog progress against the timeline and check in on stragglers, this is often when we spot the ones that have ghosted within a 3 weeks of launch. That is when we reach out to them, via what ever methods they have added to their applications. This 3 week period is where you could consider new challengers, but in challenges where we have a limited amount of kits, this is not an option.

We sanity check new challengers and new users but do also take a few chances, and will continue to do so, for example, 3 or 4 of the most recent design challenges have had new members as winners and many others as finisher prize winners.

These success stories are the reason I continue to take risks on new members as well as a mix of trustworthy members.

We find a lot of people are daunted by the size of design challenges so try to keep the barriers to entry a low as possible and also promote project 14 as something with easier access.

Now... lets discuss how we can weight these a little bit more to reduce drop numbers.

Originally a high quality application was seen to be enough of a deterrent to weed out most of the people testing their luck.

This no longer seems to be enough.

As for people building up reputation before being invited to join a challenge, my stance is that I will continue to take applications from new and old members, but I think there is a need for a skype call with applicants that could be classed as higher risk.

I will update the application page to help be more transparent in regards to what is required of a challenger.

I want to confirm my stance of keeping the barrier to entry a low as possible to new members but also confirm the intention of those joining.

Thank you all for your input and suggestions, please keep it coming!

-Phil Hutchinson

Hi Phil,

From my perspective there is a lot of interesting Design Challenge output, there is always something to read! (I just wish each participant could bear in mind that a reader may not have the benefit of reading all previous posts when a blog post is written each week - it is hard to recall what each project is about when there are many challengers and blog posts. Some people are great at this, e.g. dixonselvan content has an overview or convenient links on every blog post, and others provide an introduction too, which is great.

I think your current screening approach/balance is therefore very good judging by the quality and volume of output, and can only get better with time as it is refined in the manner you say, e.g. Skype calls and other 1:1 methods to get confidence in participants where needed.

Hi Phil,

From my perspective there is a lot of interesting Design Challenge output, there is always something to read! (I just wish each participant could bear in mind that a reader may not have the benefit of reading all previous posts when a blog post is written each week - it is hard to recall what each project is about when there are many challengers and blog posts. Some people are great at this, e.g. dixonselvan content has an overview or convenient links on every blog post, and others provide an introduction too, which is great.

I think your current screening approach/balance is therefore very good judging by the quality and volume of output, and can only get better with time as it is refined in the manner you say, e.g. Skype calls and other 1:1 methods to get confidence in participants where needed.

A separate topic but perhaps all that linking stuff could be made easier for people doing a blog series such as a design challenge. I do remember it being a pain to have to manually add all the links.

This is something that we have put some thought into.  Allowing people move from post to post.

We have some project shakeups coming soon.

e14phil  wrote:

 

This is something that we have put some thought into.  Allowing people move from post to post.

We have some project shakeups coming soon.

Interested! Many of my posts are series.

Also I think some stuff needs to be done by authors, to aid the reader into understanding a blog post in isolation.

I hate to use an example, I'm not putting them down, but see here (this was just on the list of recent updates):

Week 8(?) - Putting It All Together

It is hard to know what this project is about : ( and even if there were links to previous parts, I'm not sure anything on the page would motivate some to click and see (say) Week 1, in the hope it describes it more. And yet if they did, perhaps this week 8 blog post would make total sense to many more people - clearly a lot of work has gone into it, judging by the photo on that blog post. It's just a shame it's not been conveyed to potential readers. In fact some may never click on that page at all, because the blog title doesn't hint at what it's about, except that something got put together in week 8 : ( To be clear, the project looks super interesting from the photo, and it looks neatly assembled, just not many people may see it : (

Yes, shabaz. Its sometimes difficult to see a design contest post in its context. Maybe e14 could help with making a contest series of blogs more consistent. Or versed bloggers could step in to help contestants to put a line in the story?

I personally think its the authors and our responsibility as you say, to step in and suggest to authors from time to time where needed.

The worst would be where we no longer have a blank canvas for a blog post, and end up with templates : (

I prefer it when individuals have creativity and their own uniqueness on their blog posts, but perhaps some training or link to hints could help, to suggest to authors on what they can do. I recall Spanner Spencer wrote an awesome blog post on how to write blog posts : )

I still recall bits of it, since it was quite interesting and informative.

I'll try to dig it up..

Hey shabaz,

I would really like to know how to better use hyper links within posts to jump between sections. If you can dig that post up it would be greatly appreciated.

Kas

Hi Kas,

Ah, I know that one, because I did it recently : )

Basically, once you've written your blog post, and any section titles have been marked as such using the Editor tools (i.e. marked as Heading 1 or Heading 2 etc) then click on the first line of your blog post, and go to Editor tools and select from the tools the ">>" button (for "more tools") and then select Table of Contents. A symbol appears in the blog post. When you save the blog post, the symbol is replaced by a table of contents with hyperlinks!

found it..

How to Write Your Design Challenge Blog Posts

shabaz,

Thank you for the information I wonder if a new group would be helpful. The group could be for tips and pointers for things like this. I remember a while ago one roadtest had a lot of good info about taking pictures of displays. The issue is all this great and useful information (taking pictures, linking sections, etc.) are scattered around the site. If someone wants to find it, it can be very hard. If there was a group where such information could collated for easy finding and referencing it might help not only those new to blogging but even some of us who have been doing it for a long while.

Kas