Submissions for 2019
Hello there!
Thanks for being interested in submitting a piece to UXmas.com. We're looking forward to sharing your idea with the world, and this page will help you understand exactly how we can make that happen together.
If you have any questions or suggestions about submissions, we'd love to hear from you. Simply send your message to hello@uxmas.com
Let's start on the same page - what is UXmas.com?
Each year since 2012, UX professionals from around the world have collaborated to create a holiday-themed website called UXmas—a digital advent calendar where each day we open a door to reveal an insightful little UX nugget. Contributors come from a range of backgrounds, experiences, and specialities. It’s a fun idea, and together we see it as another small way to share ideas and learn within a curious and supportive UX community. Production and editorial work for UXmas is performed by the team from UX Mastery, and the site design is put together by the team from Thirst Studios.
By submitting your idea you'll be joining some of the finest and brightest voices in user experience design.
How do submissions work?
In previous years, we reached out personally to every single contributor and worked with them to develop ideas and get them published. That is a lot of work, and while we know it was worth it, it also meant we missed out on hearing from people we didn't know yet, but probably would like to work with. So, we've now switched to a method that allows anyone to submit their pieces, and we select and curate pieces based on merit.
What will help my submission be accepted?
The best UXmas content is playful, personal, meaningful and unexpected—a small UXmas gift that will spark a conversation, generate an insight, or help the UX community in a practical way. We love it when people have some fun with the idea and are able to inject some light-heartedness and festive spirit.
If you convince us your piece has potential, we'll work hard alongside you to make it the best it can be.
To keep it relaxed but useful, we generally prefer non-text pieces, mixed media, or pieces with a short wordcount.
- Short stories
- Diagrams
- Comic strips
- Cartoons or illustrations
- Videos
For example:
- A sketch or comic strip telling a story or making a point
- An interactive bit of HTML and scripting that does something freshA diagram related to design or UX-related work that you’ve found helpful yourself
- A short and humorous storyboard/comic about a person using your product
- A memorable ‘war story’ from your work in the field doing research
- A creative imagining of how an idea emerged
- A poem or song
- A magic trick that explains a core UX-related principle
- A quirky principle/fact/insight about UX or design you like to share with people
- A short, relatable, personal story about something that happened while working with other in your team/stakeholders/interviewing users
- A short but very practical tip you think UXers need to know
- A guided video tour of your workplace, including some quirky secrets that UX beginners or other designers would love to know
- A UX process/technique that you disagree with, and what you like to do instead
- How following a certain UX process helped you do something good
- That time you failed, and what it taught you
- What you wish you’d known in your first year as a UX professional
- Pro tips learned from hard-earned experience
If your entry needs some text to help describe things and make it shine, or if your idea really only works as text, that’s fine too. We want to avoid texty articles and will generally aim for no more than 300 words, but this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. We hope this will keep things simple—for the UXmas readers as well as you the author—it means you’re not spending lots of time on an epic submission during the pre-holiday rush period.
What else do I need to include in my submission?
As part of your submission we need you to send along a ~100-word bio plus a picture of you having fun in some kind of festive costume or location. This will appear in the footer of your article, and as your entry in the UXmas authors’ hall of fame.
In the past people have used colourful hats, santa hats, funny sunglasses, tinsel, Xmas trees, Snapchat filters, gift-wrapped items… Feel free to have a bit of fun with it—readers are expecting something light-hearted, and you don’t want to be the only author with a ‘serious’ picture!
Submission Deadlines
Please get your idea or finished piece to us sooner rather than later. We'd love to give you feedback and help your piece achieve its potential. We have only 25 spots to fill, so selections are made by our editors after the deadline for submissions, based on the merit of the pieces.
Deadline for UXmas 2019 submissions: October 15, 2019