1st iPhone App UI Designed Through TC Direct

Radio station tagging service RadioTAGr used TopCoder Direct to design the front end for its new Apple iPhone App, which will enable users to find out what song is playing on any radio station across the country, tag it, and in future releases, buy it immediately from iTunes or Amazon.com.

RadioTAGr’s first contest was to get a look & feel for the app, so a short two-day contest was run to get a bunch of concept ideas. They settled on a winner (shown) and will run a second contest to apply this look and feel to the rest of the app. The actual source files of the winning submission will be uploaded as an attachment to the second contest, giving all the competitors the same actual design elements to work with.

Like many TopCoder customers, RadioTAGr found success in breaking down the design process into smaller parts. A smaller contest – at a lower prize amount – is a good way to receive multiple submissions for a design “concept” – giving the customer a variety of designs choose from before going forward with designing the whole application.

The added bonus is that the second contest, which is many more pages or screens of the application – can actually be priced at a lower prize amount, since the design part is actually done, and the competitiors this time just need to apply the concept to the rest of the app.