Dutch Usability Award 2010

Since 2001 Metrixlab organizes the yearly Dutch Usability Award. Usually, really big web sites win this award. Not that strange since they have the budgets and manpower to focus on usability. I attended the award ceremony in Hilversum at the Centrum voor Beeld en Geluid.

Overal, I had a good time. The usability learnings that were presented were okay, I learned some small things there that I can apply at ABN AMRO. The “Stand-up usability” was less so. This was a kind of improv usability. People in the audience could scream web sites’ addresses and the jury would then point out nifty usability tricks or obvious usability blunders (mostly obvious blunders). When the audience asked for feedback on the award’s own website, the jury refused to give this.

Fortunately, the presentation on the differences in usability between Belgian and Dutch web sites by Karl Gilis was hilarious. Maybe more so because in the Netherlands we have a lot of jokes about Belgium people and his presentation supported our existing prejudices. However, Karl was still able to point out a Belgian web site that had better usability than its Dutch counterpart.

It was very strange that the web site of one of the jury members, Ruben Timmermans, was nominated for the Usability Awards, even in the top five. Fortunately, his web site did not win and ended somewhere fourth of fifth. That would have been a weird conflict of interest and have harmed the award’s reputation.

So, congratulations everybody from Bol.com on winning the first place!