Design for Experience Awards

The International
Design for Experience
Awards

We are proud to announce the international Design for Experience (DfE) Awards program. This program, operated in partnership with UX Magazine, recognizes people, teams, and companies that have achieved success in the design of user- and customer-centered products or services.

The application window has closed and the judging process has begun. Because of the deadline extension, the timeline for the notification of semi-finalists and the choosing of winners has been pushed back. If you applied for an award and have questions, please email us at awardapps@designforexperience.com

Application Deadline Extended to January 19

How the DFE Awards
Work for You

The Design for Experience (DfE) awards program offers unique opportunities for user- and customer-centered leaders to gain well-deserved recognition and credibility. The awards program rewards notable products, services, practices, and teams, and is an opportunity for you to showcase the story of your successes to help other people and companies in the field as they pursue mastery of the craft.

All applicants will be given a permanent page on the DfE site to showcase their accomplishments, and may be featured in future articles and whitepapers on UX Magazine.

What Winners Receive

Winners will receive prominent exposure in UX Magazine, the leading publication in the realm of experience design. UX Magazine will be turning information submitted by winners into articles exploring the unique success they’ve experienced and the process that got them there.
A dynamic physical award that does more than just collect dust on a shelf—it catches people’s attention and prompts conversations. We’re currently refining the first prototype; sign up for email updates to be notified when photos and videos are available.
Public listing on a permanent winners page on the DfE awards site congratulating winners and linking to their permanent page on our site.

What Runners-Up Receive

Runners-up will be part of features in UX Magazine exploring the outcomes of judging in each category.
A handsome engraved plaque.
Public listing on a permanent runner-up page on the DfE awards site linking to their permanent page on our site.

Benefits of Applying – Agencies

Agencies exist to make their clients look good, lending their smarts and savvy to the client’s benefit without the expectation of wide recognition for the successes of their projects. Winning a DfE award gives agencies an opportunity to demonstrate their excellence in a way that transcends specific client work. The DfE awards offer a way to show potential clients, prospective employees, and the broader design community what your agency is truly capable of and why your approach to designing for experience is a cut above the rest.

Benefits of Applying – In-House Groups

As experience strategy and design continue to work their way deeper into the fabric of companies of every size and shape, it becomes more acutely obvious which companies know how to truly serve their customers and users. Winning a DfE award is an opportunity to show them that the quality of the experiences you offer is hard-fought and exceptional. It also shows hard-to-find practitioners that your company is somewhere they’d enjoy working, and can be used to continue to build support for experience strategy, research, and design among stakeholders and executives.

Benefits of Applying – Individual Practitioners

Practitioners working in experience-related fields are often overshadowed by the experiences they work so diligently to create. For most of us, being unrecognized is actually a kind of compliment; the experience should be the focus and should be so easy and sensible that people’s attention isn’t drawn away from their goals onto the design itself. A DfE award offers lasting, meaningful recognition for the excellence of your work by your peers and some of the most respected members of the UX community, and can go a long way toward vindicating your tireless advocacy of users, research, design, and experience strategy.

Benefits of Applying – Academic Community

Experience design and technology encompass a set of disciplines that are rapidly growing and in importance, value, and complexity. Winning a DfE award shows current and prospective students and faculty, as well as the broader academic community, that your institution working at the modern forefront, shaping the future of design and technology and enriching the workforce with prepared, experienced new talent.

Recognizing masters
of many
categories

We will give away awards in many categories, ranging from interactive product to web to customer experience. By doing this we recognize the winners as masters in their field. Not sure which category is the best fit for you? Just click here to let us know and we'll assign someone to help you personally.

Academic Program

Too few academic programs exist that provide a direct onramp into experience-oriented professions. This award recognizes academic programs in both traditional and non-traditional settings that do the best job of preparing students with the right information, skills, soft skills, and experience to contribute valuably to experience-driven projects.
Accessibility

It’s increasingly achievable for technology to be accessible to people with physical and sensory impairments and those with needs for special modes of interaction. However, accessibility remains under-adopted as a requirement for products and services, and rampant fragmentation threatens progress toward universality of accessible experiences. This award recognizes companies, teams, individuals, products, and services that are shining examples of how accessibility can be embraced to create experiential value for users and customers as well as economic value for the creators of the experience.
Adoption of Experience Strategy

Companies that provide exceptional experiences in their products and services understand that user and customer experience are high-level strategic values, not just low-level tactical practices. This award recognizes companies that have thoroughly and effectively embraced experience-orientation as a strategy, and where success in so doing is evident in executive leadership, design and engineering teams, and the rest of the staff who have the ability to influence user and customer experiences.
Bottom Line Impact

User-centricity and attention to the quality of user experiences are usually not ends in and of themselves, but are rather the means to another end: driving business success. Put differently, it’s the business goals and economic interests of businesses that fuel user-oriented strategies and fund the creation of experience-driven technologies. This award recognizes new or redesigned products, services, and other experiences that made a major difference on the business’ bottom line through the application of experience strategy and/or creation of high-quality experiences.
Bridging Digital and Physical Experiences

As microchips have become cheaper and smaller, and as technological convergence has continued to progress, more and more experiences with physical objects and environments have integral digital components. As well, it’s become increasingly possible to design digital systems that can be interacted with by way of physical devices far different from the traditional mouse, keyboard, or touchscreen. This award recognizes compelling examples of bridging the digital and physical realms to create valuable new experiences.
Bringing Order to Big Data Category

The rate at which data is created and collected never ceases to increase, and the awesome volume of data that currently exists is a theoretical treasure trove for understanding the past and present and for predicting the future. To unlock the value of “big data,” new ways of connecting, interpreting and visualizing massive data sets must be designed. This award recognizes compelling examples of how the design of digital visualizations, interfaces, interaction models, and other user experience solutions have advanced understanding of complex questions.
Complete Customer Experience

Seen from the inside, companies can be messy, complex, and dependent on fragmented technological systems. But when seen from the outside, companies with successful customer experience (CX) strategies appear cohesive, comprehensible, and unified, and customers can interact with the company through a well-coordinated ecosystem of products and touchpoints. This award recognizes companies that offer a consistent, cohesive customer experience that maintains a sense of brand, delivers value and rewarding experiences, and is tightly interconnected and easy to navigate.
Consumer Product

Increasingly, consumer products are being designed with user needs and usability in mind. This is indicative of the growing awareness and interest in the practices of user-centered design. This award recognizes consumer products that create or enable excellent experiences for their users, and whose design was strongly influenced by user-centered research and design practices.
Cross-Platform Experience

Users interact with products and services through a growing diversity of platforms: installed software, mobile apps, web apps, smart TVs, etc. Each platform has unique strengths, weaknesses, constraints, uses, and modes of interaction. This award recognizes product and service experiences that span multiple platforms, make the best use of the strengths of each, create an overall experience that’s greater than the sum of its parts, let users move easily and naturally between platforms, and potentially offer capabilities that couldn’t have been achieved without the interconnection of platforms.
Effective Agency Team

Great experiences originate the minds and combined efforts of effective experience-oriented teams. When a company invests in the design and creation of an experience-driven product or service, the effectiveness of the team is the most influential variable in the reduction of risk and improvement of upside potential. This award recognizes agencies, or specific teams within larger agencies, that consistently design or create effective or exemplary digital experiences on behalf of their clients.
Effective In-House Team

Great experiences originate the minds and combined efforts of effective experience-oriented teams. When a company invests in the design and creation of an experience-driven product or service, the effectiveness of the team is the most influential variable in the reduction of risk and improvement of upside potential. This award recognizes experience-oriented product teams, UX business units, project groups, or any other kind of in-house team that consistently designs or creates effective or exemplary digital experiences for their company.
Experience for Children

Children can be sophisticated users of technology, and with newer methods of interaction such as touch and gestures, digital systems are accessible to an even younger set of potential users. Every age bracket of children has different specific needs for content, navigation, interactions, and other aspects of product experiences. This award recognizes digital products for children that deliver excellent value, engagement, and ease of use for their users.
Experience that Makes a Difference

Technology has incredible potential to make a positive impact in people’s lives, whether on an individual level or in addressing societal or global concerns such as hunger, security, peace, the environment, and so on. This award recognizes digital products, systems, and other experience design initiatives that have contributed meaningful improvements to people’s lives, to society, and/or to the world and where the quality of the product or system’s user experience is essential to its success.
Foresight of User Needs

This quote from Henry Ford is very familiar to user-centered practitioners: “If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse.’” Sometimes the next step forward in technology requires looking beyond what people say they want to find an entirely new way to give them what they really need. This award recognizes digital products and experiences that were prescient anticipations of true user needs, and that led instead of followed their users to new ways of thinking about and addressing a problem or opportunity.
Innovative Technique or Tool

More than any other aspect of user-centered practice, there’s striking consistency in the user research and design techniques employed by practitioners and companies. Still, there are opportunities for existing techniques to be improved upon, or for altogether new ones to be devised. Similarly, there's a certain amount of uniformity to the design tools available to experience designers, such as those used to create wireframes and prototypes. Here, too, there is room for improvement and innovation. This award recognizes new or improved research techniques, design techniques, and design tools that have the strongest potential to affect the quality and success of the design of experiences.
Interaction Design Innovation

Very often, the need for familiarity and intuitiveness in IxD trumps whatever desire designers might have to create unique or innovative interactions. Sometimes, however, unique combinations of platforms, requirements, constraints, user needs, and other factors demand that new interactions be devised or familiar ones be substantially redesigned. This award recognizes specific, designed interactions that thoughtfully and necessarily innovate or depart from convention to contribute significantly to the quality, ease of use, engagement, and/or effectiveness of the overall product or solution.
Interactive Component of an Advertising Campaign

The line between the realm of advertising and those of software and Internet has gotten very blurry, and nearly every major advertising campaign has significant online and/or interactive components. However, many of these interactive components serve the needs of the business and its hopes for how customers might behave much more than they do actual customer needs and desires. This award recognizes interactive components to advertising campaigns that deliver real value, engagement, and/or utility to customers while creatively complementing the other facets of the campaign.
Mobile Solution or Application

The ubiquity of mobile devices and mobile-platform computing has led to an astonishing diversity of mobile applications and solutions. The quality and usefulness of these is very inconsistent, though, and many are created without sufficient regard to the needs of users and the opportunities inherent to the mobile platforms. This award recognizes mobile applications and solutions that work with the unique device capabilities, contexts of use, and modes of use of mobile devices to expose new and valuable capabilities to users by way of exceptionally well-designed experiences.
Promoting Empathy for Users

While designing a product, service, or other experience, project team members have to make decisions with the best interests of users in mind. Very few of these decisions can be made in consultation with actual users, so it falls to the team to attempt to see the world from the users’ point of view and make informed decisions on their behalf. This award recognizes companies, project/product groups, and other groups that most successfully promote a well-informed empathy for users among team members that leads to greater success in their work.
Public Sector Experience

Political, budgetary, security, and compliance realities typically cause the quality and usefulness of public sector technologies to lag far behind those of the private sector. Nevertheless, there are extraordinary opportunities to use user-centered practices to effect positive changes in governments and societies. This award recognizes digital solutions, applications, services, and other experiences created by or for public-sector entities that have made noteworthy use of user-centered practices to create solutions that significantly advance the work of those entities and deliver real value to citizens.
Strategy to Execution

Most new digital products and experiences are created by businesses in pursuit of commercial interests. While meeting user needs may be a key goal in the development of these experiences, the realization of business goals remains the principal driver. But the means by which technology can be used to achieve a specific business goal isn’t always obvious, or the obvious solution might not be the best one. This award recognizes digital solutions, applications, services, and other experiences that represent the most creative and effective translation of a business strategy or goal into a technology solution.
Union of Design and Engineering

Traditionally, designers and engineers worked in separate organizational silos, interacting by throwing deliverables “over the wall.” But now the two practice areas are more intensively collaborative and integrated, which results in more practicable designs, better designed implementations, lessened risk, and improved success in projects. This award recognizes companies, teams, project/product groups, and other assemblages of designers and engineers that are shining examples of cross-disciplinary collaboration in the achievement of success in creating digital solutions.
Work Environment for Digital Practitioners - Agency

The job marketplace for experience-oriented practitioners is extremely competitive. To attract, retain, and motivate the talent necessary to build exceptional digital experiences, companies must focus and innovate on the environment they offer digital practitioners. This award recognizes agencies that have created outstanding work environments for experience-oriented practitioners that enable them to be productive and happy, and ensures low turnover and strong retention.
Work Environment for Digital Practitioners - In-House

The job marketplace for experience-oriented practitioners is extremely competitive. To attract, retain, and motivate the talent necessary to build exceptional digital experiences, companies must focus and innovate on the environment they offer digital practitioners. This award recognizes in-house groups that have created outstanding work environments for experience-oriented practitioners that enable them to be productive and happy, and ensures low turnover and strong retention.

Chosen by the
Community,
Judged by
Experts

Your recommendations will help drive who makes it into the final rounds, where a panel of prestigious, expert judges will choose winners. We're excited and grateful to have these masters of experience research and design supporting the DfE Awards.

Richard Anderson

User/customer experience practice, management, and organizational strategy consultant, teacher, commentator, editor

Richard Anderson is a "user/customer experience" practice, management, and organizational strategy consultant with international management, cross-organizational development, and more than 20 years of experience. He started and directed the Experience Center at Viant, as well as the User Research & Experience Strategy discipline at Studio Archetype and Sapient, and has held and supported other management roles in an assortment of companies. At CHI 2007, Richard received SIGCHI's Lifetime Service Award for extensively facilitating and spreading the development of the field via his leadership contributions to BayCHI and to other chapters of SIGCHI around the world. He was Co-Editor-in-Chief of interactions magazine from 2008 through 2010, and he currently teaches UX to graduate students at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. He also speaks and writes about transforming healthcare and the patient experience and is co-founding Optimal Experience Strategy.

Stephen P. Anderson

Data Cowboy and author of Seductive Interaction Design

Stephen P. Anderson is an internationally recognized speaker and consultant based out of Dallas, Texas. He created the Mental Notes card deck, a tool that's widely used by product teams to apply psychology to interaction design. He’s also of the author of the book Seductive Interaction Design, which answers the question: "How do we get people to fall in love with our applications?”

Mark Baskinger

Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon School of Design

Mark Baskinger is an Associate Professor and Area Head of the First Year program in the School of Design who teaches courses in interaction and industrial design. His interests include exploring new paradigms for interactive objects and interpretive environments, and methodologies of design drawing and visual thinking to promote collaboration. Baskinger is currently a fellow in The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, a laboratory for atypical, anti-disciplinary, and inter-institutional research at the intersections of arts, science, technology and culture.

Kerry Bodine

Customer Experience Expert and Co-Author of Outside In

Kerry Bodine is a customer experience expert and the co-author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business. She taps into her past work as both a design practitioner and manager—as well as her master's degree in human-computer interaction from Carnegie Mellon University—to help clients envision and define broad, end-to-end customer experiences. Bodine was formerly the vice president and principal analyst in Forrester's customer experience research practice where she was instrumental in the development of many evaluation methodologies, including the Website Review, Phone Agent Review, Kiosk Review, Blog Review, and Persona Review.

Leah Buley

Design Strategist at Intuit and author of The User Experience Team of One

Leah is a design strategist for Intuit, where she works on the future of business and personal finance. She speaks and writes about techniques for spreading the reach of UX inside of organizations. Her work spans a variety of industries, including media, mobile, financial services, education, and non-profit. She is also the author of The User Experience Team of One. Leah has a master's degree in library and information science from San Jose State University and a bachelor's in American studies from Barnard College. When she's not working, you can find her at the dog park with Roku, the cutest dog ever.

Giles Colborne

Managing Director of cxpartners, business mentor, and author of Simple and Usable

Giles founded cxpartners with Richard Caddick in 2004 with the vision of creating a company where every design decision was based on user research and where the success of a design was based on measurable outcomes. He is a former president of the UK User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) and has organized major conferences and events in the UK and US, including The IA Summit 2013. Giles wrote the best-selling book Simple and Usable web, mobile and interaction design and has worked with British Standards Institute in developing guidance on web accessibility.

Sarah Doody

User experience designer, consultant, and writer

Sarah Doody is a user experience designer, consultant, and writer based in New York City. Sarah works with early stage start-ups and entrepreneurs to help establish their initial product and helps companies already in market evolve their existing user experience. Sarah is passionate about helping companies use the power of storytelling to help teams shift their focus from products to people.

Alex Faaborg

Staff Designer at Google

Alex is a user experience designer with a focus in interactive design and art direction. He has a BA from Cornell University and a MS from the MIT Media Lab. His background is in cognitive science, human-computer interaction, and user interface design and implementation. He's currently a Staff Designer at Google performing interface design for Android, and was previously a Principal Designer at Mozilla.

Nick Finck

Director of User Experience at projekt202

Nick Finck is a user experience professional who has worked in the web industry for over a decade. He specializes in information architecture, interaction design, usability, and user research for web and mobile. Nick has created web and mobile experiences for Fortune 500 companies including Adobe, Intel, REI, Boeing, Google, and Oprah.com. He lives and plays in Seattle, Wash., where he’s the Director of User Experience at projekt202, the world leader in applying strategic design research to spark innovation.

Jeroen van Geel

Creative Director at Oak & Morrow and founder of Johnny Holland

Jeroen van Geel is the Interaction Director and Partner at the strategic design studio Oak & Morrow. He has many years of experience in the field as an interaction designer, strategist, and agile scrum master. Jeroen is an international speaker and writer on the field of interaction design and has a great interest in the world of product personality. He was also the founder of the seminal online design magazine Johnny Holland. His goal is to return a bit of wonder into the world, even if it is just for himself.

Debra Levin Gelman

Director, Experience Design at EPAM Empathy Lab

Debra Gelman is a researcher, designer and strategist in the field of interactive children's media. She creates sites, apps and virtual worlds for clients including PBS Kids Sprout, Scholastic, Crayola, Pepperidge Farm, Campbell's Soup and Georgia Public Television. Deb led the research and design of Planet Orange—a site designed to teach 1st through 6th graders financial literacy—which won a USA Today Education "Best Bet" award. Deb holds undergraduate degrees in Visual Media and Psychology from American University, and a Masters in Information Design and Technology from Georgia Tech.

Suzanne Ginsburg

User experience consultant and author of Designing the iPhone User Experience

Suzanne Ginsburg is a user experience consultant based in San Francisco, California, working with many different kinds of organizations, from established technology companies to small iPhone start-ups. Suzanne also maintains a UX blog, Touchy Talk, where she provides advice on touchscreen app design.

Jeff Gothelf

Managing Director of Neo and author of Lean UX: Applying lean principles to improve user experience

Jeff Gothelf is a designer, product team leader, and writer. He is one of the leading voices on the topic of Agile UX and Lean UX. Jeff has led cross-functional product design teams at TheLadders, Publicis Modem, WebTrends, Fidelity, and AOL while maintaining a strong advisory and mentorship presence in the startup communities of New York City and Silicon Valley. He is currently a managing director in Neo’s NYC office.

Jan Jursa

Information Architect, T-Systems Multimedia Solutions and Editor in Chief of UX Storytellers

Jan is an information architect who was born in Prague but is living in Berlin. He is a co-founder of the German IA Summit, MobX, and MEDlove. He is also part of the European Centre for UX, hosts the podcast IATV Radio, and co-organizes the Berlin IA Cocktail Hour. Jan is the Editor-in-Chief of UX Storytellers: Connecting the dots, in which 42 UX masterminds share their stories as experience design professionals.

Theresa Neil

UX designer, start-up advisor, speaker, and author of Mobile Design Pattern Gallery and Designing Web Interfaces

Theresa Neil is an international design expert based in Austin Texas. She's passionate about making products that look good and work well. Her top selling O'Reilly books, Designing Web Interfaces, co-authored with Bill Scott, and the Mobile Design Pattern Gallery have helped thousands of IT professionals advance their design skills and create better experiences. Theresa and her team of experts work closely with clients to define and deliver UX solutions for complex problems.

Christopher Noessel

Chris Noessel

Managing Director and Practice Lead of Interaction Design at Cooper, co-author of Make it So

Christopher Noessel, in his day job as managing director at the pioneering interaction design firm Cooper, designs products, services, and strategy for the health, financial, and consumer domains, among others. In his role as practice lead, he helps manage the “generator” type of interaction designers, helping them build their skills and lead client projects to greatness. He has been doing interaction design for more than 20 years and is the co-author of Make it So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction.

Steve Portigal

Founder of Portigal Consulting and author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights

In his role at Portigal Consulting, a bite-sized firm that helps clients to discover and act on new insights about themselves and their customers, Steve has interviewed hundreds of people, including families eating breakfast, hotel maintenance staff, architects, rock musicians, home-automation enthusiasts, credit-default swap traders, and radiologists. His work has informed the development of mobile devices, medical information systems, music gear, wine packaging, financial services, corporate intranets, videoconferencing systems, and iPod accessories. Steve speaks regularly at corporate events and conferences such as CHI, IxDA, Lift, SXSW, UIE, UPA, UX Australia, UX Hong Kong, UX Lisbon, and WebVisions. His articles about culture, design, innovation, and interviewing users have been published in interactions, Core77, Ambidextrous, and Johnny Holland.

Nathan Shedroff

Program chair of MBA in Design Strategy, and experience strategist

Nathan is a seasoned, professional experience strategist and serial entrepreneur as well as a pioneer in the fields of experience design, interaction design, and information design. He speaks and teaches internationally, and his many books include Experience Design 1.1, Making Meaning, Design Is the Problem, Design Strategy in Action, and Make It So. Nathan is currently Associate Professor and Chair for the MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts, and a board member at AIGA and Teague.

Donna Spencer

Designer, consultant, and organizer

Donna designs websites, web applications, and mobile apps as a user experience consultant, working with a wide range of clients in government, telecommunications, insurance, retail, not-for-profit, and higher education. She is the author of books about information architecture, card sorting, and writing for the web. Donna also teaches workshops, mentors startups, writes for online magazines, and is a technical editor for Smashing Magazine. Recognized internationally as a leading UX practitioner, she runs UX Australia, a conference that started in 2009. Despite all this success, what she really wants to do is work with fabric. She's been sewing since she was a child, and weaving for about 16 years. Donna recently decided to study fashion design and see where this takes her—it’s going to be an interesting journey, and she’ll finally learn to draw!

Scott Stroud

UX consultant and strategist

Scott is an independent UX consultant in Washington, D.C. He is currently the lead architect for the responsive redesign of NPR.org. Scott helps organizations implement lean UX practices including frequent, effective user testing in agile development environments. He's the former Director of User Experience at LivingSocial and was the Lead Experience Architect at NPR responsible for designing the NPR iPad app and NPR Music iPhone app. Scott is also an RYT-500 certified yoga instructor.

Jason Cranford Teague

UX Lead at Gannett Digital Marketing Services, speaker, and author of CSS3 Visual Quickstart Guide and Fluid Web Typography

Jason combines creative and technical know-how to help people communicate online. He has worked with businesses and organizations, including USA TODAY, Marriott International, AOL, Virgin, Bank of America, The Aspen Institute, and The Solar Energy Industry Association. Jason is well known for being able to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences. His most recent book is CSS3 Visual Quickstart Guide available in finer bookstores everywhere. Jason blogs regularly for GeekDad, Edutopia and tweets @JasonSpeaking.

Steve Tengler

Senior Director of User Experience at Altia, Inc. and Adjunct Professor at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

As the Senior Director of User Experience at Altia, Inc., Steve Tengler oversees the global team of engineers and designers in their application of Altia's User Interface Engineering software. He leads UX development for the company's engineering services customers—with projects spanning automotive, medical, home appliance and consumer device applications. Steve is a proven expert in the field of Human-Machine Interface design and deployment with over 20 years of experience on some of the country's top automotive teams including Ford, Nissan, and OnStar. Steve has two degrees from The University of Michigan, and will also be an Adjunct Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in Ann Arbor next Fall (Go Blue!). In his spare time (yeah right), he runs a non-profit organization providing scholarships to student who, despite tremendous need, volunteers to help others.

James Torio

Solution Manager at McKinsey & Company

James Torio is a solution manager for a leading global management consultancy. He has consulted for Fortune 500 companies in financial services, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and insurance. He designs products that support the goals and behaviors of the people who use them.

Russ Unger

Experience Design Director at GE Capital and co-author of A Project Guide to UX Design

Russ Unger is a UX Designer and Researcher in the Chicago area where he leads teams and projects. He is co-author of the books A Project Guide to UX Design, Designing the Conversation, and the forthcoming Speaker Camp for Peachpit Press (Voices That Matter). Russ is also working on a book about guerrilla design and research methods that is due out well, sometime. Russ is co-founder of ChicagoCamps, which hosts low-cost, high-value technology events in the Chicago area, and he is also on the Advisory Board for the Department of Web Design and Development at Harrington College of Design. Russ has two daughters who both draw better than he does and are currently beginning to surpass his limited abilities in coding.

Susan Weinschenk

Behavioral psychologist, author, speaker, consultant, and mentor in the psychology of experiences

Susan Weinschenk is the person to go to when you need to know how to persuade and motivate people to take action. She has a Ph.D. in Psychology and over 30 years of experience as a behavioral psychologist. Her clients call her “The Brain Lady” because she applies research on brain science to predict, understand, and explain what motivates people and how they behave. Dr. Weinschenk is the author of several books, including How To Get People To Do Stuff, 100 Things Every Presenter Needs To Know About People, 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People, and Neuro Web Design: What makes them click? Susan is the founder of the Weinschenk Institute, LLC.

Indi Young

User experience consultant, founding partner at Adaptive Path, and author of Mental Models

Indi Young was afflicted with the "problem solving" disease at an early age. Her parents are both inveterate problem solvers. At her father's side, she watched him figure out how to build an airplane with folding wings so it could be stored in a garage instead of housed in an expensive hangar. With her mother, she learned about growing wheat and grinding it for flour to make bread, since there were no good whole wheat loaves available at the supermarket. A founding partner of Adaptive Path in 2001, she has worked with an impressive collection of clients, including Visa, Charles Schwab, Sybase, Agilent, Dow Corning, Microsoft, and PeopleSoft. Since 1993, Indi has constructed over 35 mental model research projects. She considers this methodology she has developed another good way to be a "problem solver."

Jonathan Anderson

Editor-in-Chief of UX Magazine and author of Effective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software

Jonathan is a tech-focused jack of all trades involved in many tech companies and startups. He helped found EffectiveUI, a leading UX strategy, design, and development agency, and wrote the book Effective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software before moving on to edit UX Magazine. Jonathan is also Sr. Advisor to Didus, a staffing & career development agency focused on user-centered jobs in research, design, technology, and strategy. Jonathan has also kickstarted several community-based initiatives to improve opportunities and knowledge in UX and related fields, and contribute to the overall maturation and improvement of user-centered research, practices, and education.

Commending
Mastery we
can all learn
from

Design for Experience’s goal is to help others master their field. So one extra criterion for judging the awards will be how well the practices employed by the entrants can teach other practitioners and help them become better at their work. The successful entries will be those that not only demonstrate exemplary practice, but that are also examples of innovative and remarkable processes that can be learned from.

Showcasing not just outcomes but also the processes and practices that led to them

Recognizing depth of thought and design problem-solving, not just glossy visuals

Using awards as a way of advancing knowledge in the realm of designing for experience

The International Design for Experience Awards

How the DFE Awards Work for You

What Winners Receive

What Runners-Up Receive

Benefits of Applying – Agencies

Benefits of Applying – In-House Groups

Benefits of Applying – Individual Practitioners

Benefits of Applying – Academic Community

Recognizing masters of many categories

Academic Program

Accessibility

Adoption of Experience Strategy

Bottom Line Impact

Bridging Digital and Physical Experiences

Bringing Order to Big Data Category

Complete Customer Experience

Consumer Product

Cross-Platform Experience

Effective Agency Team

Effective In-House Team

Experience for Children

Experience that Makes a Difference

Foresight of User Needs

Innovative Technique or Tool

Interaction Design Innovation

Interactive Component of an Advertising Campaign

Mobile Solution or Application

Promoting Empathy for Users

Public Sector Experience

Strategy to Execution

Union of Design and Engineering

Work Environment for Digital Practitioners - Agency

Work Environment for Digital Practitioners - In-House

Chosen by the Community, Judged by Experts

Commending Mastery we can all learn from

Submit a Recommendation

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Get updates via email

Get Assistance with the Award Application Process

Useful Downloads to Support Your Award Application

General Information and Category Descriptions

Category-Specific Documents

The International
Design for Experience
Awards

How the DFE Awards
Work for You

Recognizing masters
of many
categories

Chosen by the
Community,
Judged by
Experts

Commending
Mastery we
can all learn
from