Last year I ran a design contest and then didn’t award the $1,500 prize. Needless to say, that wasn’t received well.

Then I made the problem worse by refusing to discuss it openly here. I did discuss it with each of the four designers that submitted entries, and all but one, including the owner of the best design, understood the decision. I knew from talking about it with other people, though, that many just wouldn’t accept it no matter how long we talked about it, and for that reason, I decided to announce the decision with little comment in order to just avoid a no-win situation.

What that did instead, though, was take the conversation elsewhere and make it more negative. It still wouldn’t have been all positive (or maybe even mostly positive) had it stayed here, but it wouldn’t have disintegrated like it did. However, when someone makes a decision that reeks of impropriety, as I did, refusing to discuss it any further understandably causes others to assume what is most likely.

I wish now that I had taken the advice that Mike gave in How not to run a “design contest”:

In order to clean up this mess and regain at least a small portion of his reputation back this issue needs some very clear and decisive action.

Obviously the first step is to enlighten the audience, or at least the winning designer, on the “missing” requirement(s). When information is held and both parties are vague it shows a huge breakdown in communication. That’s where rumors are started, opinions are formed and respect is lost.

By opening up the lines of communication the rumors can be dealt with and a dialog on how to remedy the situation can be started. Whether the designer did miss a requirement or not, if they know what they’re missing, most, if not all, designers will do whatever they can to fix it.

Why the $1,500 Wasn’t Awarded

So let me go into more detail about why we didn’t choose a winner.

We had a very narrow set of requirements that we laid out as clearly as we possibly could. Only the handful of absolute requirements was listed and the rest was completely left up to the designer. The problem was that none of the designs met the minimum requirements.

For example, of all the requirements, the only one we over-emphasized by putting it in italics was “the user should be able to drill down to a specific facility type in a specific city using only text links.” Our goal for the site was improving their search engine traffic, and we had to have the text links to do that. Yet three of the four submissions omitted them.

To Mike’s points, we did let each of the designers know specifically what they were missing. We even worked back and forth up until the deadline with a couple of them who were close, but neither were able to achieve what we absolutely had to have.

So the client and I were left with a choice: choose the one who got the closest and work with them to get to where we needed to be, or feature all the entries on UMS but apply the prize money toward hiring a new designer. In the end, we just didn’t feel confident at all that any of the entrants could get us to where we needed to be, so rather than ask any of them to continue to work without any guarantee of success, we decided instead to go with a new designer. Three of the four entrants, including the winner, were fine with that, and so we moved on.

So Why Bring This Back Up Again Now?

I should have been more willing to discuss this nine months ago, regardless of the perceived outcome, but because I wasn’t, it has only festered. I realized that when writing my latest post, and knew it would remain that way until I dealt with it. And that’s why I’m bringing it back up. To let everyone know what actually happened. To do what I should have done last July. I’m sure people will still disagree with the decision we made even after knowing all the facts, and I can totally respect that, but at least you now know the whole story and can decide for yourself.