At the recently held Boye 19 Aarhus conference, five European software vendors competed in the new Small Feature Award on showing a small feature with big impact.
What’s the small feature that really makes the product way better? Is it a small design change, an elegantly engineered new piece of functionality or something else? In this new 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 vendors covering very different use cases from Decisions showing how to collaborate on a meeting agenda in Microsoft Team to eZ Systems showing a Content Tree to provide a better overview for editors.
The three who received the most votes and some critical acclaim from the jury were:
Christian Rudolf from eXa doing the opening part of the pitch for their content editor with impressive image manipulation features
eXa Online from Germany who showed automatic cropping of images. Since we left the desktop-only world about a decade ago, using images in the right and meaningful format has been a real pain across different channels and on devices in many different sizes. The jury was both impressed with the balance between juggling different formats for each channel as well as the speed. It literally took 1 click and seemingly less than a second to fix 30 different useful versions of the same image.
Bart Omlo showed the content analyzer as a plug-in to Kentico Kontent
Kentico from the Czech Republic showed an impressive content analyzer. As a plug-in this was well-done and the implementation of having different plug-ins to enhance core functionality is quite appealing. The content analyzer plug-in seemed nice and sweet: With one click it would analyze the text and the editorial interface to make adjustments afterwards was both modern and intuitive.
Finally the winner from both the jury and with the most popular votes were:
Gavin Colborne from Little Forest together with the Small Feature Award Jury (from left to right: Melissa Breker, Sharon O’Dea and Martin Frederiksen) and conference chair Janus Boye. Instead of a sizable trophy, the winner received a diploma with a donation made to the new DataEthics think tank.
Gavin Colborne from Little Forest making his pitch on domain discovery
Little Forest from the UK who showed a small feature called domain discovery. To most people it is an incredible surprise how large their digital estate has become over the years. Using a dashboard-like view, you can get an overview of the often stunning list of domains who belong to your organisation and easily mark who is responsible and a suggest task, like designate for renewal. Clearly if you don’t have a grasp on your domains, it can have far reaching consequences, both legally and financially.
Below you can review the video from the 2019 Small Feature Award with all the five vendors