by Janus Boye
Small features can indeed have a huge impact and make all the difference. This has always been the focus of our Small Feature Award, and earlier this month the annual contest was held for the 3rd time at the Boye Aarhus 21 conference with 6 strong contesters.
Congratulations to content operations software firm GatherContent, which impressed both the crowd and the jury with their shareable links feature - enough to win the prestigious award ahead of 5 other vendors.
One happy winner: Hugh Downer (in the middle) with jury member Michael Bednar-Brandt (to the left) and Martin Michael Frederiksen (to the right). Janus Boye in the background. Photo: Ib Sørensen
Shareable links deliver huge value in a very short time
Hugh Downer from GatherContent used his 5 minutes wisely and started by describing the problem they are addressing with their shareable links feature
Shareable links is perhaps a bit self-explanatory and also known from Dropbox or Google Drive. For the award winners at GatherContent with a content operations platform, it was a truly small feature built in very little time, and with very little code and user interface.
To quote from the winning pitch:
Shareable links is a simple approach to get essential communications created or approved by very stretched stakeholders.
According to GatherContent, in May alone, when covid measures were first being widely enforced and information and guidance were changing hourly, they saw over 16,000 individual people use shareable links to get essential communications created or approved by very stretched stakeholders! They definitely had no time for friction in their workflow.
Small features are not insignificant
During the live demos, it became quite clear that small features come in different shapes and forms, but actually often solve big problems.
The judges highlighted the work done by SWOOP, which offers workplace analytics. During the brief demo of SWOOP Personas, we saw a feature that gave insights into digital workplace relationships. This enables you to find out whether colleagues or managers are really contributing or only listening to the internal conversation and works based on Teams, Yammer and Workplace interactions. The judges also asked for it to work with Slack, but according to Cai Kjær from SWOOP, Slack is less relevant for social listening in large, complex and global organisations as they rarely use it wall-to-wall.
Before the judges revealed the winner, they also gave a so-called honorary mention to the past winner UK-based Little Forest. Back in 2019, they won with a nifty domain discovery feature and this year showed a fascinating live demo with quality reporting on web pages. Not just in terms of broken links and potential typos, but also readability and other indicators. As the judges said:
This feature has winning potential, but needs a bit more polish to be even more intuitive
Thanks to the small feature award jury
This year the jury consisted of:
Helle Jensen (DK), Experience Director at Valtech
Martin Michael Frederiksen (DK), independent software specialist who co-founded a CMS vendor 20 years ago
Michael Bednar Brandt (AT), Head of Business Innovation at Oracle NEXT
Previous Small Feature Award winners
In 2020, we had to do the contest with hybrid participation due to the pandemic, but still a local vendor came out as the winner: Ucommerce Won With An Elegant Solution To Managing Your Shop
As previously mentioned, UK-based Little Forest took it in 2019 with domain discovery: Little Forest Won A Close Race With A Simple Solution To Huge Problems