By Janus Boye
Joel Varty from Agility seen together with Ivo Lukac shortly after the winner was announced!
Congratulations to Joel Varty and Jon Voigt from Agility for winning the #boye23 conference Small Feature Award. Their remarkable CMS feature, which allows real-time viewing of other users' edits and presence, impressed both the judges and conference participants, earning them the majority vote.
This feature exemplifies how a subtle enhancement can significantly improve user experience. It's especially relevant in a post-pandemic world, facilitating remote teamwork seamlessly.
The small feature showed by Agility is a new enhancement, which improves the preview functionality with real-time viewing of other users' edits and presence
Other notable features in the competition included rapid upload and conversion of a spreadsheet into a full-blown database for e-commerce (Enterspeed), calculation of the carbon footprint for a website including optimization tips (energyfriendlyweb.com), an automatic summary of web page content for large websites using AI (Little Forest) and AI-driven content production and translation inside a employee communication platform (Haiilo).
A happy winner - left from right: Janus Boye, Joel Varty, Jens Hofman Hansen, Shannon Mølhave, Martin Frederiksen and Ivo Lukac. Photo: Ib Sørensen
The 2023 judges were Ivo Lukac, Jens Hofman Hansen, Martin Michael Frederiksen and Shannon Mølhave.
Small features make a big difference
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 annual contest, we celebrate the unsung heroes of the workplace: The small features that make all the difference.
The 2023 Small feature award ceremony was held at Aarhus Street Food as a part of the Boye Aarhus 23 conference. Photo: Ib Sørensen
Selected vendors presented six-minute walkthroughs showing the best small features of their system.
Previous winners include Plotteriet, a local Aarhus-based printshop focused on sustainability, as well as GatherContent, Ucommerce and Little Forest.
Enjoy the power of live demos
When I worked at a CMS vendor in Germany from 1999 - 2002, live demos was an important and daily part of my job. Back then there was no pre-recorded elements and certainly no way of doing it remote. You brought your laptop and made it work and when it worked, it was incredibly powerful. Like the old adage, where a picture says a thousand words, a live demo could cut through lengthy documentation, requirement specifications and numerous workshops.
Joel Varty from Agility explaining what’s going on in his live demo
Think about how important the driving experience is when you buy a car. Would you buy a car just based on some slides? Or perhaps more in the same price range, would you buy a house to live in, just based on a fancy deck from a slick realtor? No, you wouldn’t right, but why are so many then buying enterprise software, upwards of millions of dollars, without actually trying it out?
Or like Relationships & community lead at Konabos, Matthew McQueeny recently said:
“Software presentations without live demos are akin to concerts without the band playing the songs”
To keep the art of the live demo going, we’ve integrated them to our conference for the past decade and you can experience it next at these upcoming events:
CMS Kickoff 24 in January in Florida
Boye Aarhus 24 in Aarhus in November
You can also read more about live demos in these posts:
Pieter Brinkman at Sitecore also enjoys live demos and he wrote this post after the Boye Aarhus 23 conference: The power of live demos at events. At Sitecore they have guided click-through demos that guide you through the product.
Michael Carter, my personal demo mentor 25 years ago, generously shared what 94 quarters worth of demos taught him