Optimal Workshop Prize Draw: And the Winner is ...

A man reaches into a box to select a card with the winner's name on it

As part of last week’s launch of A Practical Guide to Information Architecture, Second Edition, we ran a competition to give away $1,990 worth of UX testing tools, courtesy of the good folks at Optimal Workshop.

The prize draw was open to anyone who purchased the book in the first 24 hours or so after it was launched, with one lucky customer scoring themselves an annual license to all three tools—Treejack, OptimalSort, and Chalkmark.

Rather than be all smoke-and-mirrors about how we did that, we thought we’d record a video showing the exact process we followed for determining the winner. Here it is!

Congratulations Jaime! We hope you enjoy your annual subscription to the Optimal Workshop suite.

Update: here’s Jaime’s response …

Wow this is great!
My name is Jaime (James in English), I’m 27 years old. I’m from Chile, a long and narrow country in South America ;)
I’m a part-time PhD student (in Computer Science) and a full-time project manager with a local airline called SkyAirline.
With any luck, I’ll start working on the website redesign of this airline, and these tools will be incredibly useful to perform user testing, and help me give priority to UX projects.

Video transcript

Hi guys, this is Matt here, from UX Mastery.

So we launched Donna’s book last week: “A Practical Guide to Information Architecture, Second Edition”. And a bunch of you purchased within the first day or so, to go into the draw to win nearly $2,000 worth of Optimal Workshop software.

You get the UX testing tools, which includes Treejack, OptimalSort, and Chalkmark. It’s an annual license.

I thought I would just record a quick video to show you how we selected the winner.

So what I’ve got here is an Excel spreadsheet, and it’s got every single person that purchased before the countdown timer ran out, and there are nearly 200 of you. And you’ve got this random number that I’ve assigned to everyone, and a little Excel script that I’m going to copy and paste into the cell, to work out who is going to be the winner of the Optimal Workshop suite.

So here we go! I’ll paste this little formula and it will select one of the people in the list … and that person is Jaime Diaz. So congratulations Jaime! You’re our winner. You are the lucky recipient of the Optimal Workshop annual subscription to those three awesome tools, so congratulations.

For everyone else, bad luck! But I hope you enjoy Donna’s book, and all the bonus goodies that came with it.

Thanks very much, and congratulations Jaime!