So the challenge is revealed on Tuesday 13th. Details can be found here: www.best.hr/code-challenge/v2.0/zadatak (in Croatian).
For the English speaking readers the task can be summarized in just few words: "Mobile Experience of BEST.hr". Of course there are some more details given but the essence of the task is there. I hope students will recognize it and implement the solutions according to our suggestions.
Let me explain in more details why have we chosen this kind of task. By "we" I mean BEST student organization, IT4U, UXPassion and Netgen.
- Mobile is cool, mobile is sexy, mobile is soon to be more important than desktop. There is already a need for good mobile developers. So to stay in touch with the present and prepare for the future we want to see how students are able to respond to this need. To give the student enough choices following platforms are allowed: Android, iOS, Win7 for mobile apps and HTML5/CSS3/JS for mobile web.
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Experience is more difficult to explain but also the most important requirement. We have seen a great shift in experience in last decade from slow, overbloated and ugly desktop applications to simple, slick and fast web solutions. On mobile phones user experience is even more important by the nature of the medium. Small screens require special care of space usage, availabitly of actions buttons etc. People are used to have what they want as fast as possible. And they want to feel good about it. A slow, buggy, ugly and confusing interface is not welcome any more.
"The Devil is in the details" - Last but not least is the domain of the student organiziation which organizes the competition: BEST.hr. Our strong opinion is that the task should produce something useful that can be used later on. There is a chance that any of the submited solutions could be used as a real mobile interface for the BEST.hr domain. To go even further with that students should use JSON feed directly from that domain to get the content. So once deployed solution is going to be integrated well.
Let the best students win :)