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Double win for Bit Zesty at the UXUK Awards

Nov 2019

Bit Zesty won two awards at this year’s UXUK Awards! Our SXT digital partner notification tool won in both the Best Public Sector and Best Innovation categories at an awards ceremony in London. 

The User Experience UK (UXUK) Awards were established in 2013 to recognise excellence in user-focused digital product or service design. The awards celebrate the great and innovative UX offerings from organisations that take pride in creating the best possible online or multi-channel experiences.

This year, the UXUK Awards were held at the Crypt in the Green in London on 21 November 2019. 

The winning project

Each year, around 500,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with a Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI). The major challenge is getting diagnosed patients to notify their sexual partners – a conversation nobody wants to have. One organisation addressing this problem is SXT, a Community Interest Company (CIC). It engaged Bit Zesty to create a digital service that allows clinicians and patients to notify their previous sexual partners anonymously. Partners receive an SMS message telling them that they need to get tested and helping them find a clinic nearby.

Laura Paplauskaite, founder and managing director at Bit Zesty, said, “The SXT Partner Notification Service is an amazing project that is not only innovative but also has a profound positive impact on people’s lives. The aim is to reduce the spread of STIs by notifying partners of diagnosed patients – to date, over 14,000 partners have been notified. It is masterminded by our brilliant client, Anatole S Menon-Johansson, the Founder and Director of SXT. And it’s been an honour to realise his vision.” 

“Dr Menon-Johansson is passionate about the cause and has devoted his life to it; he is a true visionary – always looking for ways to innovate and push boundaries to achieve real impact. It’s only because he is open to the human-centred approach to creating technology that we were able to achieve such real impact on patients’ lives,” added Laura. 

“The sheer amount of industry recognition this project has received to date is testimony to all that hard work and the positive impact it’s had on patients’ lives as well as healthcare professionals’ time,” she said.

Bit Zesty's managing director Laura Paplauskaite collecting the award for Best Innovation for the SXT project with some of the other Bit Zesty team at the UXUK Awards.

What the judges said 

Winning in the Best Public Sector category, the judges said:

“More than 1 million sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are acquired every day worldwide. The SXT service allows patients diagnosed with an STI to anonymously notify their sexual partners of STI risk.

“This service overcame the challenges of starting the conversation that people don’t want to have along with meeting government targets for partner notification rates.

“The team followed a thorough user-focused process and developed very simple user experience, providing a great service which solves a problem in an innovative way.”

Winning in the Best Innovation category, the judges said: 

“Following great service design processes, which has resulted in 27 health providers now using the service, over 3,000 hours of work saved by health professionals and 14,000 sexual partners notified. SXT has really made an impact and we wanted to shine a spotlight on this ground-breaking service.”

The BBC’s iPlayer team won Best User Experience on the night – as well as in the Best Entertainment and Leisure category – for the creation of an impressive user-focused immersive experience for live events such as Wimbledon and Glastonbury. There were also some great entries in the Student category with Loughborough University’s Pinar Dumlu winning for her project tackling postpartum depression (PPD) in first-time mothers. 

The SXT project has now won a total of 12 awards. Other awards we’ve won for our SXT project include a Digital Impact Award, BIMA award for Product & Service Design, Design Week Award for App Design in the UK, IF Gold Award for Service Design & UX in Germany and an IDEA Silver Award for Service Design in the USA.

Interested in working together?
Contact us or email [email protected] to discuss how you can transform your service’s impact with a bespoke digital product.


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