
PUXies Awards Nominees (1st Annual)
"Plannedscape UX (User Experience Awards)" for Outstanding Interfaces
Posted by Plannedscape Staff
on 2021-12-23
Nominees for our inaugaral year of the PUXies were selected by our internal blue-ribbon committee. The voting will continue through January 20, 2022 and final decisions on award winners will be decided in a hybrid of your voting with our blue-ribbon panel breaking ties.
Click here to Vote!

Meanwhile, just like the Oscars have their "kids table" of non-televised awards for technical and non-acting achievements from a separate ceremony, we’d love to congratulate our first PUXies Awards winners below. Awards were presented at an undisclosed luncheon:
Browsers

Firefox
Runners-Up: Chromium, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari
Notice what's missing from this list? MS-Internet Explorer / MS Edge. Their transition from a dying browser nobody wanted to a new browser nobody wants is complete and seamless.
News Apps

Washington Post
Runners-Up: AP News, Flipboard, New York Times, Pocket
Washington Post phone app is solid. More than just bullet points, gives you a taste of each major article, but still lets you get through articles and decide what you want to read in a reasonable amount of time. It's not easy for journalistic enterprises to manage how many free articles to show and where to erect their pay walls, seriously. But we've got to say that Apple News and MSNBC are just plain unpleasant user experiences. Pocket is a pretty novel idea, if you haven't used it before.
Bill-Paying & Banking Experience

T-Mobile
Runners-Up: AAA Auto Club, SiriusXM, USAA, Wells Fargo
T-Mobile is kind of surprising, isn't it. Not surprising is that we can safely say that the worst has to be ATT for maybe the 10th year running. They managed to acquire Directv and take it from being a smooth, customer-forward business to being every bit as unpleasant as ATT has been for anybody who's had the misfortune to be mixed up with them for even a month. Some strong runners up to the runners up: AAA Auto Club, YMCA, Alaska Airlines (only because they don't quite fit the category). These nominees run the billing sections of their sites so well, we really don't mind paying them money each month. That's saying something.
TV - Opening Credits
Flight Attendant
Runners-Up: F is for Family, NBA on ESPN, Succession, The White Lotus
Not the quality of the show, just the opening credits sequence. Think of it this way: on a remote, which of these would you be least likely to press the "Skip Intro" button?
Search Engine

Runners-Up: DuckDuckGo, Wikipedia , Yahoo, YouTube
It would have been really fun to say something besides Google but there’s really no way to do that. You’ll notice that there are some entries here you don’t think of as "search engines" but really are. YouTube really is by far the 2nd biggest search engine in the U.S. Dishonorable Mention: Bing. Microsoft has a lot of successful silos in difficult fields: Running an operating system, their Office suite still being the gold standard for document editing and viewing, OneDrive holding its own in a competitive cloud market. But search engine design is not a field they've had a lot of luck with.
Underrated Apps/Services

Google - My Maps
Runners-Up: Archive.org, Google - Advanced Search, Grammarly, Uber Eats
We're praising Uber Eats as a way to slam GrubHub (since they actively screw the smaller restaurants they deliver for by squatting on or squeezing out their websites). Archive.org holds everything that's every been on the internet, which is nice. Don't sleep on the options under "Tools" in Google searches (looking in past year, looking for file types, looking within a domain, etc.). We'll be writing a proper blog post about that soon, we promise. But the nod goes to Google My Maps - we love sharing our map, shopping, travel favorites with like-minded friends as the ultimate travel app,
Don’t forget to cast your vote!
