Via GeekWire, Written by Kurt Schlosser

The finalists in the UX Design of the Year category at the 2023 GeekWire Awards are working to help end users across a variety of disciplines, including health care, worker training, workspace collaboration, and employee performance evaluation.

The award is intended to recognize a product that has a user experience that is meaningful, usable and delightful for those end-users. The five finalists are CalmWave, Knapsack, Soovu Labs, Taqtile, and Textio.

The 2022 winner for UX Design of the Year was Humanly, a Seattle HR startup that helps companies screen job candidates, schedule interviews, automate initial communication, run reference checks, and more.

The GeekWire Awards recognize the top innovators and companies in Pacific Northwest technology. Finalists in this category and others were selected based on community nominations, along with input from GeekWire Awards judges. Community voting across all categories will continue until May 1, combined with feedback from judges to determine the winner in each category.

We’ll announce the winners on May 18 at the GeekWire Awards, presented by Astound Business Solutions. There are a limited number of table sponsorships available to attend the event. Contact our events team at events@geekwire.com for more information.

Keep scrolling for descriptions of each finalist for UX Design of the Year, presented by Blink. Descriptions have been edited for brevity and clarity.

CalmWave

Product demo: CalmWave Operations Health Platform

End user: Clinicians (nurses, nurse managers, and intensivists) and administrators in hospital environments. Intensive Care Units (ICUs) are the first departments that CalmWave targets as they have the largest volume of noise from medical alarming and patient monitoring systems.

Describe how the UX benefits an end user: CalmWave’s web-based user interface is focused on delivering what is typically very complicated and messy patient information (i.e. vital signs, electronic medical record data, etc.) in a simple and digestible format. The status quo for healthcare companies is to show six-foot-wide monitors displaying 30 patients’ vital signs data while each monitor is constantly ringing with alarms. This quickly creates cognitive overload for clinicians tasked with monitoring the health of their patients. CalmWave thinks of the vital signs, interventions, notes, and lab results that their product ingests as all-encompassed within a giant sphere of medical data. Their UX pattern provides users with “views” into different spheres of this data. Each view has three lenses associated with it, showing micro to macro visibility from an individual patient or clinician to a ward and even across the entire hospital.

Knapsack

End users: Entire product teams (designers, engineers, content, etc.) within enterprise organizations.

Describe how the UX benefits an end user: Unite product, design, and engineering teams in one collaborative workspace. A flexible end-to-end design system platform built for the enterprise, Knapsack enables teams to build better products in half the time.

Soovu Labs

End users: Individuals suffering from chronic, musculoskeletal, or menstrual pain.

Describe how the UX benefits an end-user: Soovu is a wearable technology that uses pulsing heat to block pain signals, resulting in drug-free pain relief. The system includes a wearable device controlled by a mobile app. A user follows three steps to initiate the HeatWave therapy session: 1) User applies the device to the area that hurts using an adhesive ring that magnetically attaches to the underside of the device; 2) User launches the app and selects the location of the body that hurts; 3) User hits “Start session” on the app and the heating cycle begins. Users have complete control of the therapy — they can set the heat’s duration, temperature, and pulse pattern. The app collects a limited amount of data up-front so as not to delay the user’s therapy. The device is wireless, discreet, and rechargeable.

Taqtile

End users: The 2.5 billion deskless workers in industries including manufacturing, aerospace MRO, pharmaceutical, transportation, and defense.

Describe how the UX benefits an end user: The “tribal” knowledge of organizations around the world walks out the front door every time an employee leaves or changes roles. And once it is gone it is hard to regain. This is knowledge required to keep manufacturing equipment running, install and service cell towers, maintain and repair vehicles and machinery, or any of the hundreds of operational and maintenance procedures required to keep a company running. Manifest Maker is a simple tool to document knowledge and improve the performance of a workforce without requiring any special skills to use it. Workers simply grab an iPad, record an expert operating a machine, maintaining equipment or inspecting a vehicle, and then transform the video into step-by-step directions and guidance for less experienced workers.

Textio

End users: People managers who write performance reviews for their direct reports; leaders of talent management who are accountable to ensuring equitable employee development.

Describe how the UX benefits an end user: Textio for Performance Management provides in-line guidance to people managers writing performance reviews in Workday HCM, helping them remove biased language and to write more fair and equitable performance feedback for every employee. (The tool is built as a browser extension that layers over the Workday HCM user interface. This embeds Textio directly into people managers’ workflows, so they have access to frictionless guidance right where they write performance reviews). Leaders of talent management can log into the Textio web app to see patterns in problematic language across departments and demographic groups, enabling them to intervene where there are inequities.

Thanks to gold-level and category sponsors: Wilson Sonsini, JLL, Blink, BECU, Baird, Fuel Talent, RSM, Talent Reach, WTIA, Meridian Capital, Bank of America, and T-Mobile. And thanks to silver level sponsors: First Tech, Remitly, Fuel Talent, and SolluCIO Partners.

If interested in sponsoring a category or purchasing a table sponsorship for the event, contact us at events@geekwire.com.