How do you design the next generation tool for educators? Living Progress Challenge proposes a novel approach: competition. They’ve broken down the process: wireframe, responsive design, administration screens, mobile design and user interface prototype. Each stage has its own specification and members of Topcoder.com submit their solutions.

For our first Wireframe challenge we’ve received 8 submissions in first round and then picked 5 that created final wireframes. We’ll highlight winning submission and some of the more interesting solutions that they came up with. Wireframes are supposed to just show the structure and layout of information. We’ll get a few design proposals in next challenge.

We start with home screen. It’s either customised to each logged user or it shows most popular resources and collections. On top, there is always present header with search functionality and menu options.

We’ve seen a few different approaches on how to represent boards of different resources. Current consensus seems to be that we should work towards self assembling collages of highlighted resources.

It’s interesting to compare above layout with a similar one from another participant:

As a final screen, we present a detailed resource view. As with anything, they’ll have to be further adjusted to different types of OER contents and what meta information is associated with it.

Overall experience with first challenge was a positive one. We’ve received a number of different approaches. This allowed us to give better feedback to participants and to also revisit some of our own ideas.