JonathanLarson

I just have to say wow, what a horrible experience. The only reason people stand the torture of figuring out how to apply and dealing with the interface is because the prizes are so big.

My experience started with trying to sign up for the SilverLight challenge version of the Interface Design Challenge. First off, no where on the site does it mention the Silverlight challenge, at all. In fact when you look at the Interface Challenge the prize money is off, the deadlines are off, and the restrictions for who can apply aren’t listed for the Silverlight so it seems the whole time that you are in the wrong place. I know it’s only a few schools that can enter, but it’s still confusing and if they want people to apply they should make it easy.

So now that i’m throughly confused if this is even the right place, i start to wonder if the instructions on what to deliver are correct. If one thing can be wrong, how can i take it that anything is right? With a leap of faith I sign up and make a team with my friend. After that microsoft does provide a helpful checklist of what to do. Problem is you can’t click on the names in the list to go the location where you can fix that. I get to the step to fill out your information and go to the link where it has a list of what’s in green telling you what you need to fill out to continue. Good job microsoft because you actually need to fill out information not in the green, aka your personal information like name and address to continue. If it’s not mandatory why do you have to do it?

The next step was getting a live id. This is where the checklist gave no direction where to go. Eventually my roommate found it “conveniently listed in the extraneaous looking subpanels on the left.” The design was so distant from the rest of the site i always thought it was an advertisement on some other microsoft contest. Who is the genius to do that? Once we figured that out it was smoother sailing. But seriously, to get to this point we had to struggle so much, should microsoft have done some usability testing?

Lastly, could they try harder to mimic an adobe design style?