illumi Awards Showcase

Speaker 1

But we're also here to celebrate. And with that, where's Johan? Where's my buddy? Where's my pal? Here he comes. I'm bringing the party. We're gonna talk some awards.

Let's do this.

Speaker 2

Thank you.

I am super conscious of the fact that I'm standing between all of you and the cocktail bar.

Actually, that's not true, because you're standing between you and the cocktail bar, and I'm to talk about why in a moment. But I do want to just take a very brief moment to thank all of the user testing folks who worked really **** ** this event, as well as our production team. Could we just get a quick round of applause for everybody who put this amazing thing together? Thank you.

So, I hope all of you are familiar with our Illumi Awards. It's our eighth year of doing these. It's an incredible way for us to recognize you and the achievements that you make in your work, and the outcomes that you deliver.

This year we had a record number of submissions. The team worked for countless hours reviewing all of the submissions.

And we've recognized twenty seven different organizations. We have twelve category winners, and fifteen distinguished luminaries that we're going to recognize. And we're going to take the next three hours and go through every these are folks who represent the best stories across markets and industries.

I'm not going to go through all of them. I'm going to pick four that are in the room today.

You can corner these folks out at the cocktail bar and have some conversations. But I do want to take a moment and share their stories, because I think they're worth celebrating. And I think you'll take some really great stuff away from them. So this first company can we go to the next slide?

The first company is the Enterprise Impact Award. So this is the one for delivering scalable success through human insight. Now, these guys in twenty twenty three won an Illumi award, so they're a repeat winner, for their use of the QX score. So they got it in, and that was worth celebrating.

But then came the hard part, which was scaling the QX score out.

Ironically, when they put it in, the scores started dropping.

And they were dropping not because things were bad, but because they were measuring things that hadn't been measured before. So with millions of customers and real revenue on the line, they started doing the hard work of tying QX scores to OKRs. They built quality gates. They hosted a leadership summit. And they looked at over three thousand five hundred interactions over nine journeys.

So for the first time, leadership had one consistent signal across the entire digital portfolio. The scores didn't just recover, they hit an all time high.

At seventy nine point eight, they were up fourteen point seven percent.

So this company is an example of how a measurement tool can become a transformation engine. Put your hands together for American Airlines. Alright.

Our next our next award is the Innovation Catalyst Award.

So this is a company that has groundbreaking innovation inspired by human insight. That's the award.

AI, we've all heard many, many times today, AI makes design faster.

And research struggles to keep up with that, right? Like making sure that setups and screeners and surveys and configs get done. But the problem is those are all manual.

You heard today us talk about our MCP server.

This customer took it upon themselves before we even had ours ready. They built it themselves. They built an MCP server on top of user testing, which was a really innovative solution to get insights in ahead of the design decisions that were being made at pace.

And so now the unlock was that research could lead design, not chase it.

And that mindset is now spreading inside this company. And from my perspective, this is what research at pace looks like. So please celebrate Microsoft.

Alright. So the next story I want to share with you, is one that, they won the, Emerging Innovator Award, which is for midsize and large enterprises who use human insight to achieve really big results. And there was an industry first that they and when I start telling you this story, you're going to figure out who this is. But they were the first one of their kind to remove delivery fees on orders over fifty dollars And they did it in a high risk environment. They launched it with the Super Bowl campaign. Right? This is like a big bet.

And the risk is that the customers would see, everybody in the world would see, the Super Bowl ads, and they wouldn't believe it. And they would get into the digital app, and they just wouldn't believe it. So they launched three simultaneous studies. Twenty four hours after the launch, they got fresh eyes on every exposure path. And what they found was everybody loved the offer, of course. But they had a lot of questions in their minds about whether the promise was real. And so the gap here wasn't the offer, it was the way the offer was being explained.

And so they went to creative, product, marketing, and put a whole bunch of fixes in under forty eight hours and delivered the most industry disrupting campaign and protected its success in its most vulnerable moment. That's what Grubhub did.

All right. And the last company I want to talk about is the winner of our Mission Impact Award, which is where we recognize a nonprofit who's using human insights to drive significant outcomes. When I lived in the Bay Area, I loved these guys.

And they had an app that hadn't been updated in years. It had a three star rating and a thirty five percent repeat usage, which not great, right? And so for a mission driven nonprofit, this bad experience doesn't just hurt their metrics, it undermines the trust that the community has in them.

And so they used user testing to go out and interact with real community members.

And they realized that what the community wasn't looking for wasn't a content library. They wanted a daily companion.

And that insight changed everything for them. And so they reshaped navigation language structure and the emotional tone of their app. Now they're at four point nine stars.

Installs are up sixty six percent. Repeat usage has risen to eighty eight percent, and it's driven up six hundred percent of KQED's live radio listens. So please, KQED. So those folks are in around here.

You'll find them. Go grab them and hear their stories. There's some boards out under the tent as you're having a cocktail. Go read the stories.

We have a lot more winners and distinguished luminaries. This is the full list. We just announced this. It's on our website.

Go read the stories. Some of our distinguished luminaries are here as well.

But one more big round of applause to celebrate all of you who are doing this incredible work every day.

And, I don't know if if I'm bringing Liz. Liz, are you coming back or am I am I releasing everybody to go drink their cocktails?

Speaker 1

Like a bad

Speaker 2

pity.

She's back. She's back.