The Inaugural Vancouver User Experience Awards

vanue_awards_1

The UX community in Vancouver creates some of the best-designed experiences in the world. As founding members of VanUE (the Vancouver User Experience Group), we were thrilled to co-present the inaugural Vancouver User Experience Awards on November 26, 2014.

Back in 2003, a handful of user experience practitioners met, hoping to find a way to connect Vancouver's burgeoning UX community. Since then, the resulting organization—VanUE—has grown organically over the past 11 years to over 1400 Meetup members today, with a great lineup of monthly UX events.

This year, for the first time, we set out to celebrate and recognize the great work being done in our own city.

The night kicked off with socializing, craft beers provided by Moody Ales, and Singapore-style street food from Chicken On Rice.

highres_431932018

We were fortunate to have Jonathan Suter, founder of Simple Tax, as our keynote speaker. Simple Tax is revolutionizing the Canadian tax industry by actually making taxes easy and pleasant. People really, really love Simple Tax (seriously — check out the tweet below). During his keynote, Suter shared the importance of bringing a fresh perspective to a problem, pointing out that, "In the beginner's mind there are possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few."

highres_431932112

Our amazing emcee, Ben Skelton, director of Brand & Experience at Habanero and VanUE co-founder, shared why we feel that joy, elegance, simplicity, and innovation are at the core of a great user experience. These criteria were used to judge our six award categories: Student, Non-Profit, Employee Experience and Engagement, Customer Experience, Future Experiences, and People's Choice.

highres_431932117

Congratulations to all the winners and finalists, and a big thank you to everyone for their support!

highres_431932104

Overall, feedback for the event has been outstanding—and we can't wait for next year!

Explore the Winner and Finalist Solutions