SILS students win national Web site design contest

A team of seven SILS undergraduate students won first prize in a national Web site design contest for a project they worked on in a human-computer interaction course taught by Dr. Gary Marchionini. The students involved were: Anecia Allen, Jen O'Bryan, Brent Caison, Krystal Foxx, Terrance Hairston, Aaron Shah and William White.

Their design was for Chapel Hill Housing Department, which does not have a Web site yet. Marchionini said the project began with a user needs assessment, involved the housing department while they developed the prototype and has already impacted the agency.

“As a result of this involvement, the department will actually add a web presence using this design and has begun to think through several aspects of their overall workflow,” Marchionini said. “The students also met with the webmaster for the town of Chapel Hill who will eventually host this site for the housing department. This meeting set up the potential for easy integration of the student site into the town's site.”

The interface design, available at http://chh.obryanconsulting.com/, allows visitors to research information about public housing neighborhoods and apply for housing assistance.

Team leader Caison said the biggest challenge was keeping the project moving forward and making sure the work was distributed evenly among all team members.

“This class project was a great real world training experience,” Caison said. “Winning the contest is sort of icing on the cake.”

The 2004 User Interface Design Contest asked students to create a Web site to help a campus, community, neighborhood, healthcare, philanthropic, museum or educational organization to gain real-world experience and make a difference in their community. Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant, authors of Designing the User Interface, judged all submissions based on effectiveness for the organization; appropriate information architecture; exemplary interface design; originality; and the degree to which the project is implemented and used. The contest was sponsored by Addison-Wesley, a publisher in the higher education market.