FBLA-PBL Competition Redux: Sometimes Less is More
As most of you already know I was a judge for the web design portion of the FBLA-PBL National Competition here in Chicago last week. It was, as I knew it would be, a very rewarding experience. The sites that some of these high school students put together were amazing both visually and technically. I definitely learned some things from these kids and I hope I was able to pass on some of my knowledge to them.
That said, I was struck by one portion of the judging in particular. The section that had me questioning the judging system was the section on the use of new and innovative technology. That was a required part of the judging meaning that using technology like web video, flash and the like was basically required. Honestly, I am not sure that this should be the case. What should be required is use of technology that suits the business and use cases of the site while creating a great user experience.
Basically, students shouldn’t have to use technology for technology’s sake.
With that in mind the judging began and I was very impressed that, for the most part, students did not just add technology on their sites for the sake of including that particular technology. In fact a few of the top teams had such simple and elegant sites that I would have deemed them 37signals like if I could have (they didn’t have that option on the score sheet) and since the sites were supposed to be made for a theater companies or drama clubs a nice simple interface that provided information about the production and a way to buy tickets was the way to go.
I could tell one team in particular took things once step further and added multi-tiered authentication which would allow the director of the play, for example, different access to the site than the average user. With the added level of access the director could log in and utilize a built in wysiwyg text editor to update the site on her own therefore eliminating the need for costly upkeep of the site via a webmaster.
They did some other outstanding stuff as well and truly had a grasp of technology and design which was far beyond their years. Unfortunately a more flash based flashy website stole the show (based on the pre-judged scores that I was not a part of) even though the back-end and business fit of that site was far less interesting.
All in all the kids did an outstanding job and I was happy to see that a lot of them only used technologies when there was a business case and/or user interaction case that called for them. Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to do this again someday and I thank the FBLA for including me this time around.
I ended up on the “e-business” panel, and it was very interesting, in that our judging criterion were almost entirely based on the presentation itself (the websites had already been pre-judged). Separating concept/execution from presentation was very tricky. Still, I was also pleasantly surprised by what high-school students were able to get up and running in a relatively short amount of time.
Dr. Pete
3 Jul 07 at 5:52 pm
[...] Google held an event with several senior executives last night in Chicago. Eric Olson told me about the event, I recently spent a fun day serving as a volunteer website judge with Eric at the annual FBLA-PBL convention - you can read those details here. [...]
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