by Janus Boye
A happy winner: Søren Spelling Lund with his diploma in recognition of his great demo and winning entry in the 2020 Small Feature Award. Photo: Ib Sørensen
At the recently held Boye 20 Aarhus conference, four software vendors competed in the 2nd annual Small Feature Award on showing a small feature with big impact.
Congratulation to Aarhus-based Ucommerce who won with an impressively simple approach to making e-commerce better.
Managing categories and changing the category structure can be a complicated process in e-commerce tools. In just about 4 minutes, we saw how easy it can be. The final touch, so to speak, that everything can be done using keyboard shortcuts pulled this contestant ahead of the pack to win the Small Feature Award 2020.
From the winning demo with Søren Spelling Lund from Ucommerce on stage at the Boye 20 Aarhus conference. Photo: Ib Sørensen
A small feature award as we look towards 2021
Unlike traditional awards in the software industry which tends to celebrate completeness of vision, feature-richness or aggressive growth, this one took a different approach.
Perhaps now more than ever, with so many tied to a screen for most of the working day, we need to look at the small feature that really makes the product way better. Whether a small design change, an elegantly engineered new piece of functionality or something else? In this international contest, the conference participants celebrated the unsung heroes of the workplace: The small features that make all the difference.
Each vendor had 6 minutes to show a walk-through in front of the jury as well as conference participants. It was a very diverse set of software vendors from around the world including Solodev showing how to do deep integration with an image bank to Little Forest showing how to do create better tests.
This year the jury consisted of:
Martin Michael Frederiksen (DK), Independent software specialist who co-founded a CMS vendor 20 years ago
Steven Pemberton (NL), Researcher, author, public speaker, and occasional broadcaster
Trine Falbe (DK), User Experience Consultant, Teacher and Writer
A closer look at each contestant
Little Forest, Netgen and Solodev participated remotely in the 2020 contest. Photo: Ib Sørensen
Here’s a brief look at what the conference participants saw and some constructive feedback from the jury.
Netgen from Croatia showed Netgen Layouts. Layouts is a layer in your web stack, or as you might say a head for headless.
The visual editor of page content is feature-rich, and the mix between selected content and content that is auto-generated based on a set of rules works well. The ability to do a smart overwrite of specific rules is also useful.
Solodev from the US shows us a nifty integration with their Amazon AWS-based CMS. The small feature was deep integration with Shutterstock, a commonly-used image bank. This is a powerful idea and simplifies the setup especially in large organisations, where the account owner and web editors are different roles in the team, probably in different departments. The feature also eliminates the need to download an image from the image bank to upload it to the CMS. Finally, direct selection is speedy and useful.
Little Forest from the UK was not only the defending 2019 small feature award winner, but also received a honorable mention this year. Last year they focused on domain discovery and this year they turned to another small feature looking at improving testing. Specifically, the small feature allows the business unit to comment on issues found in tests directly in the test database. It also keeps track of test results over time and eliminates the need to move test results back and forth between the test tool and a spreadsheet.
This is a huge impact to the ease of use for professional teams, saves a lot of time and creates a better data set of test results. Very impressive.
Ucommerce from Denmark came out the winner. Managing categories and changing the category structure can be a complicated process in e-commerce tools. The implementation by Ucommerce is simple, provides a great overview of the category structure, and the drag-and-drop features to change sort order and even hierarchy is excellent. The add-on feature where everything can be done using keyboard shortcuts adds the extra touch to the system that made the jury select Ucommerce as the 2020 winner of the Small Feature Award.