2017 Winners and Finalists
Congratulations to Our 2017 Winners
We are pleased to annouce the winners of the 2017 Vancouver UX Awards
Best UX
- Kudoz
Kudoz
People's Choice
- Annette Cheung, Kosuke Futsukaichi, Elizabeth Chan
Change the Game
UX by Students
- Sean Leach, Chris Elawa, Robyn Goodridge
The ACLU Crisis Center
UX for Products & Services
- Drive Digital
Hollyburn Properties
UX for Emerging Experiences
- Finger Food Studios
Sphero Arcade
UX for Good
- Kudoz
Kudoz
UX for Work
- Klue
Klue
UX by Students
Student projects help to remind the rest of us of what’s possible. Up-and-coming practitioners are making huge contributions to innovation in this region’s UX community. This award celebrates the work done in courses, extra-curricular activities, or portfolio projects—provided the solutions were not designed for commercial purposes. To submit for this award, applicants must be registered at a B.C. post-secondary institution during the 2016-2017 academic year.
Annette Cheung, Kosuke Futsukaichi, Elizabeth Chan
The accomplishments of female athletes are commonly under-reported and trivialized in sports culture and media, reinforcing gender-based discrimination. For the Tokyo 2020 summer games, #changethegame is a movement to advance gender equity through a campaign that challenges misogynistic language in media. #changethegame features the women of Team Canada through interviews and digital posters that visually represent each ambassador’s response to gendered language. Fans can respond with their personal definition of positive representation using the digital template, forming a collective voice towards the respectful portrayal of women in media.
Sean Leach, Chris Elawa, Robyn Goodridge
The tumultuous political climate in the United States has led to a constant stream of events where people’s civil liberties are being threatened. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is the preeminent organization that provides legal services in this domain, and there is a growing variety of situations that require a rapid legal response.
The Crisis Center is a hub on the ACLU’s existing website that is the keeper and deployer of legal resources for individuals in urgent need of help in protecting their civil liberties. Individual crisis pages are adaptable to changing circumstances and provide people with help that ranges from quick tips to potential in-person legal representation.
Scott Yu-Jan
Spot is a water usage management system that presents consumption data to home users in a fun and interactive way. The whale-shaped physical widget sits by your sinks or showers. With the audio and proximity sensor inside, it’s able to detect your water usage and visualize it to you in real-time. It reveals how much of the daily consumption goal you’ve used up and presents total consumption amounts in more understandable ways; instead of gallons and litres, how about ice cubes, bottles of water, and bath tubs of water?
No longer will water consumption data be confusing, meaningless, and only accessible to those paying the bills!
UX for Products and Services
Digital products and services play an important role in our everyday lives. We depend on them to make our lives simpler and easier to manage. Vancouver is brimming with companies whose focus is to create, refine, and hone these experiences. This award category allows us to highlight the very best in digital product and service experiences.
LlamaZOO Interactive Inc.
EasyAnatomy is a 3D canine anatomy study and reference app trusted by veterinary students, professors, and professionals in over 120 countries. Built in partnership with leading international universities and anatomists, and using MRI and CT images, EasyAnatomy features the complete canine anatomy in visually stunning 3D, and unmatched medical accuracy.
Animal anatomy is a highly detailed and complex subject, that despite involving 3D subject matter is traditionally taught and learned through a combination of 2D resources, and costly, chemically hazardous cadaver dissection. EasyAnatomy enables overworked and overstressed veterinary students to spend less time studying anatomy, learn on-demand at their own convenience, and visualize the subject matter in its natural context - 3D!
Ready
Ready provides guests the fastest way to pay, while providing restaurants the opportunity to turn complaints into great experiences. Through the Ready app, guests can view their bill at any time, pay at the press of a button and optionally leave a review. No more waiting for servers to drop off printed receipts or walk around with payment terminals. When a guest pays with Ready, the check is automatically closed in the point of sale, requiring no additional work by the server. Instead they can spend more time focusing on creating a great experience for their guests, and less time worrying about collecting payments. Best of all, Ready saves a digital receipt for each transaction making the entire experience paperless.
Drive Digital
Hollyburn Properties is a residential property management company with apartments across four major cities in Canada. When they approached Drive Digital, they did so with a sense of empathy for their user – looking for a place to live is stressful and high-stakes, but the digital experience shouldn’t have to be.
Our solution takes the frustration out of browsing for rental properties, giving users a seamless experience within a single page application. No page reloads, no clicking back and forth between different sites to find different information. The site is completely task-oriented, giving users the filtering and search tools they need to refine their experience by budget, area, and a variety of other filters.
UX for Emerging Experiences
The future is no longer at a distance—wearables, internet of things, bots, virtual, augmented and mixed reality are already here. These devices are creating a new opportunity for user experience. This award category allow us to surface the emerging interactions and immersive experiences that our community is creating.
Finger Food Studios
Finger Food Studios successfully brings the beloved Sphero robots and Apple’s Swift Playground together and makes code come alive with Sphero Arcade, a playful Swift Playground book that enable kids to control Sphero robots while building classic, interactive games with Swift.
Sphero Arcade uses bright colours, delightful animations, and a touch of personality to bring joy to learning. Each coding exercise is short and easy to digest. We first get kids excited by choosing iconic games that they already know and love: Pong, Bop It, and Pac Man. Then, we reinvent them with a Sphero robot twist. They can now program and play games with a physical robot, making the experience all the more engaging and addictive.
Finger Food Studios
Lowe’s Vision: In-Store Navigation
The Lowe's Vision In-Store Navigation app allows customers to use a Tango-enabled device to efficiently navigate through Lowe’s stores and find the products they need. Acting like a visual GPS, the app gives customers digital directions that literally appear in front of them, leading them step by step to each Lowe’s product on their shopping list via the most efficient route. The app not only makes the shopping experience more efficient and more fun for customers, it also helps Lowe’s workflow. The app can notify stores of low stock, which leads to quicker reordering and restocking, ensuring staff can spend more time advising customers on their projects.
LlamaZOO Interactive Inc.
Jetson VR is the world’s first virtual reality canine dissection experience.
Traditional cadaver dissection imposes significant ethical, health and safety, and financial pressures on universities, while also restricting veterinary students to study within set lab hours. JetsonVR enables users to conveniently, safely, and interactively explore the complete canine anatomy, and dissect it system by system, organ by organ, from inside a virtual dissection lab.
The Jetson VR experience is further complimented by detailed anatomist-written descriptions for each individual anatomical structure, and seamless real-world gesture inspired controls.
UX for Good
Non-profit organizations fill a unique and important space in the Lower Mainland. Great user experiences are essential to improving the way non-profits work with their partners, communities, and stakeholders. This award recognizes charities and foundations, social campaigns, professional associations, and public sector enterprises. Entrants should demonstrate how they’ve created a user experience that helps a non-profit organization achieve its goals and/or serve its members.
NGX Interactive
BC Children’s Hospital Virtual Aquarium
As part of an innovative approach to using purposeful art for better clinical care delivery, NGX Interactive designed a large-scale, gesture-based interactive Virtual Aquarium installation to promote curiosity, calm, and exploration among patients and their families in the Emergency Department at the new Teck Acute Care Centre. Patients can traverse through three marine environments - the BC coast, a bioluminescent ocean cave, and tropical waters, moving, interacting and exploring via gesture-based interactions. Captivating to look at, and a delight to explore, this unique interactive is a centrepiece of the groundbreaking Children’s Healing Experience Project. Working from a set of stringent hospital safety regulations and experiential requirements, NGX created a truly exceptional experience that transforms the waiting room experience for patients and their families.
Engine Digital
Ocean.org represents a pivotal shift for the Vancouver Aquarium from a local facility with conservation, research and education programs, to a globally-focused ocean conservation organization.
Engine Digital worked with the Vancouver Aquarium during this shift to help invent a global, online, content driven education experience that empowers understanding and activism for the next generation of ocean conservationists. As a mobile-first conservation engagement platform, Ocean.org sets the initial course for the organization to become a global leader in ocean based education, awareness and activism through beautiful story content that inspires action.
Kudoz
Kudoz is an experience platform that brings novelty into the everyday lives of adults with cognitive disabilities.
Volunteers share their know-how through our online catalogue. They host thoughtful and exciting, in-person experiences; anything from kick-boxing to quantum computing to song-recording. Adults with a cognitive disability use the Kudoz app to navigate experiences and break out of their everyday to connect, learn, and grow.
Kudoz is about gaining new skills, independence, confidence, and discovering new parts of yourself. It’s about leveraging strengths and a growing network all while shattering the stigma around disability. At its core, it’s about embodying a growth mindset- the idea that the mind can grow and stretch at any age no matter what ability!
UX for Work
Internal processes should never get in the way of serving customers and helping employees get stuff done. This award celebrates any solution—intranets, business applications, or other systems—that provide great user experiences for people inside organizations of any size.
Procurify
Procurify is the go-to cloud-based spend management software solution for mid-sized companies with the best in class UX. Across the world, hundreds of companies use Procurify to track, control and analyze their spending. With its comprehensive workflow and user-friendly interface, both Purchasing and Finance teams have been able to implement Procurify across departments and teams, and create a better Spend Culture in their companies.
Idea Rebel
A sales tool for Hyundai dealers, the Hyundai Dealers App is an advanced comparison centre resource that adds trust and transparency to a historically challenging interaction. This native Android application facilitates shared-screen dialogue to communicate model lineups, pricing, features, financing and promotional options. The comparison tool pulls the most up-to-date information from the JATO API to provide a comparison between Hyundai models and any comparable competitor vehicle on the market.
The Hyundai Dealers App has improved the ease of providing correct, up-to-date information for dealers, and enhanced the overall experience of buying a Hyundai. 40 pilot dealerships are testing the program, with plans for applying user feedback to V2, for nationwide implementation with an improved feature-set.
Klue
Klue is tackling an underserved problem that every company faces: collecting, curating and distributing competitive intelligence. There is an explosion of information about companies scattered around the web and streams of content being shared by coworkers inside Slack, Salesforce, shared drives and email. We are arming salespeople with relevant pieces of intel to help them win business. Klue helps product marketers and enablement teams create and keep competitive content up to date, and empowers salespeople to find and leverage that content inside applications they use every day. Klue is pursuing innovation in competitive intel management, and helping companies win more business by providing a seamless user experience that is trusted and always up to date.
