The Desert of My Dreams

It’s hard to believe but it has been almost two years since we submitted Fitster to the CHI Student Design Competition. As much work as it turned out to be, it was a really fun and rewarding experience, especially given how awesome our team was :). Since our team was the first team from SI to participate in the competition, we had to figure out a lot of things on our own (“you’re doing what? who are you again?”). I’ll never forget how intimidating it was to be the only team from Michigan and watch as other teams (from lesser universities I might add) got coached by their faculty advisers while we were just glad that United finally found and returned our luggage (oh yeah, and relieved to have managed to get our poster reprinted in a French speaking city :)). I was combing through my inbox this morning and found a thread from last year where our team was giving some advice to another SI team. I figured reposting these tips might help other teams down the line:

• Read the CHI guidelines carefully and follow them. We made sure that our paper fit the expectations of the judges. We addressed all of the things they were looking for.
• Don’t just submit what you did for your class. I don’t think our project would have been accepted had we just submitted what we did for infoviz. We did a lot of reformatting and rewriting. We took out course-specific terms. We wrote about the project knowing that the judges had never seen it before (unlike our prof). There were things in our final paper that were important to meeting course requirements but weren’t important for CHI. We took those out.
• Describe your methods and process. What sort of user research did you do? How did you come up with your design decisions? Did you test your final design with your users?
• Describe the problem your project is addressing. Who is going to use it? Why is this problem important? How does your design address the problem?
• Don’t wait to the last minute! At this point in the semester, you might be wanting to take a break and just worry about it in January. We did that and that week before the submission deadline was pretty rough for us!
• Proof read it [over and over and over again]. If you’ve got time, get someone outside of your team to read it (especially someone who isn’t familiar with the project). Even better – find a prof who knows the CHI community and its expectations and have them proof read it for you.
• Include quotes from your users. This makes it sound more legit and it is always fun to read what real people have to say.
• Do some literature/product research. Has anyone researched this problem before? Has anyone developed a product like this before? What did they find out? How did you incorporate their research into your design? How is your design better than its predecessors?
• Include photos/screenshots/flows/visuals. Some things are better described with images. Make sure to have the right balance, though.
• Give yourself enough time to format your paper into the paper template.
• Spend some time on the poster. Make sure to balance visuals with text. You can find examples from last year on flickr (search for chi2006 or chi2007). Your poster should look professional.
• Funding. Once your paper is accepted, you can get funding from Rackham (I think it was a travel grant). You just fill out one piece of paper and include your acceptance notification. We also made our case to SI and got some additional funding that way. We all also signed up to be student volunteers which covered our registration and hotel expenses.
• Functional prototype. If you have the time and skills, try to build something. Wireframes and mockups are good but a working prototype along with sound methods is more likely to impress the judges.
• Take photos. Take lots and lots of photos. Aside from just documenting the whole experience, having photos to describe your process and methods will really improve the quality of your paper and poster. And it looks nice/impressive in a portfolio and when you’re looking for a job.
• Practice, practice, and practice some more. Presenting at a poster session is a bit different from a traditional presentation so try to get as much practice as possible presenting your project in a non-linear format. Sign up for ExpoSItion and try to get as many profs as possible to quiz you and offer you feedback.
• Don’t check your luggage.
• Bring lots of business cards and resumes to the conference. You’re going to get a lot of exposure doing this and you’ll end up talking to lots of UX professionals.
• Have a backup plan. You never know what could happen to your poster! Bring a soft copy!