UX Award 2025 applications

6th annual UX Award 2025

Cambridge University Press won our UX Award 2024! Apply now for UX Award 2025!

Read the news release

About our award

We established our UX Award in 2020 to recognize publishers and library systems vendors that have developed the best user experience and journey to their content and services. Our goal through this yearly award is to inspire online library service vendors to invest resource in good UX design and make access to knowledge as easy as possible for end users.

This is the sixth year of our UX Award. Previous winners include: Cambridge University Press (2024), Sage Publishing (2023), De Gruyter (2022), nkoda (2021) and Emerald Publishing (2020).

Who can apply?

Online library service vendors of all sizes including, but not limited to:

Publishers

Library systems

Research and analytics tools

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UX Award finalists webinars

We have curated a playlist of previous UX award webinars so you can catch up on the previous winners and finalists and learn about user experience.

Watch our playlist of UX Award finalists!
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Our 2025 award judges

 

What is the process?

  • Award applications open – 2 September 2024
  • Deadline for applications – 22 November 2024
  • Finalists announced – December 2024
  • Finalists webinar – 30 January 2024
  • Winner announced at our Access Lab event – w/c 24 February 2025
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How to apply

Award criteria

We’ll provide more details but these criteria are broadly what we’re looking for:

  1. Evidence of user experience research.
  2. Demonstrate good user experience design.
  3. Tangible evidence of stakeholder engagement (including learners and researchers)
  4. Demonstrate an improved simple, seamless user journey.
  5. Provide a statement of compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility guidelines and evidence of how your product has been adapted for a diverse range of users.
  6. Define user experience goals and objectives, and explain how you measured success.
  7. Evidence how a user experience approach was strategically adopted and embedded across the organization.
  8. Describe your future plans for user research and how a user experience approach has been embedded in product development.
Apply for our UX award now!

Apply for our UX award

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Any queries?

Please contact Jane Charlton, senior marketing manager – community and content at OpenAthens.

Contact Jane