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World Usability Day (WUD) or Make Things Easier Day, [1] Established in 2005 by the Usability Professionals Association (now the User Experience Professionals Association), occurs annually to promote the values of usability, usability engineering, user-centered design, universal usability, and every user's responsibility to ask for things that work better. The day adopts a different theme each year.
World Usability Day started as an idea springing from a discussion in the fall of 2004 between two UPA board members, Elizabeth Rosenzweig and Nigel Bevan. They worked together with the UPA board to start World Usability Day and over the years, Elizabeth Rosenzweig kept it running. [2]
"World Usability Day was established to focus people on the problems and subsequent solutions related to usability. We want to raise people’s awareness of how much these problems impact all of us. If we can get thousands of people on the planet to focus on one thing for one day, we can accomplish something big. It only takes one day to change someone’s point of view, or to light a fire that can burn for years." - Elizabeth Rosenzweig [3]
Across more than 140 countries, WUD has engaged over 250,000 individuals and had an impact on their local communities. WUD has opened up the field of UX and usability in places where it did not exist before the event, such as Eastern Europe (including Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and Turkey). [4]
World Usability Day is currently run by the World Usability Initiative [5] . The WUD organizers have collaborated with renowned professional associations like SIGCHI, HCII, PLAIN, and IFIP. Together, they established the World Usability Initiative (WUI), a focused global organization. Operating as a singular, dedicated entity, WUI works closely with the United Nations, particularly concerning the human factors integral to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. [4]
Each year, World Usability Day is built around a theme relevant to the state of design and technology. [6] Previous themes include:
World Usability Day has support from notable technology leaders including:
World Usability Day events have been run in over 140 countries, including:
World Usability Day events have been sponsored by numerous corporations and organizations, including:
Jakob Nielsen is a Danish web usability consultant, human–computer interaction researcher, and co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group. He was named the “guru of Web page usability” in 1998 by The New York Times and the “king of usability” by Internet Magazine.
Ben Shneiderman is an American computer scientist, a Distinguished University Professor in the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the founding director (1983-2000) of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab. He conducted fundamental research in the field of human–computer interaction, developing new ideas, methods, and tools such as the direct manipulation interface, and his eight rules of design.
Presentation–abstraction–control (PAC) is a software architectural pattern. It is an interaction-oriented software architecture, and is somewhat similar to model–view–controller (MVC) in that it separates an interactive system into three types of components responsible for specific aspects of the application's functionality. The abstraction component retrieves and processes the data, the presentation component formats the visual and audio presentation of data, and the control component handles things such as the flow of control and communication between the other two components.
User experience design, upon which is the centralized requirements for "User Experience Design Research", defines the experience a user would go through when interacting with a company, its services, and its products. User experience design is a user centered design approach because it considers the user's experience when using a product or platform. Research, data analysis, and test results drive design decisions in UX design rather than aesthetic preferences and opinions, for which is known as UX Design Research. Unlike user interface design, which focuses solely on the design of a computer interface, UX design encompasses all aspects of a user's perceived experience with a product or website, such as its usability, usefulness, desirability, brand perception, and overall performance. UX design is also an element of the customer experience (CX), and encompasses all design aspects and design stages that are around a customer's experience.
James David Foley is an American computer scientist and computer graphics researcher. He is a Professor Emeritus and held the Stephen Fleming Chair in Telecommunications in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. He was Interim Dean of Georgia Tech's College of Computing from 2008–2010. He is perhaps best known as the co-author of several widely used textbooks in the field of computer graphics, of which over 400,000 copies are in print and translated in ten languages. Foley most recently conducted research in instructional technologies and distance education.
The ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) series of academic conferences is generally considered the most prestigious in the field of human–computer interaction and is one of the top-ranked conferences in computer science. It is hosted by ACM SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group on computer–human interaction. CHI has been held annually since 1982 and attracts thousands of international attendees.
GroupLens Research is a human–computer interaction research lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities specializing in recommender systems and online communities. GroupLens also works with mobile and ubiquitous technologies, digital libraries, and local geographic information systems.
User experience evaluation (UXE) or user experience assessment (UXA) refers to a collection of methods, skills and tools utilized to uncover how a person perceives a system before, during and after interacting with it. It is non-trivial to assess user experience since user experience is subjective, context-dependent and dynamic over time. For a UXA study to be successful, the researcher has to select the right dimensions, constructs, and methods and target the research for the specific area of interest such as game, transportation, mobile, etc.
Value sensitive design (VSD) is a theoretically grounded approach to the design of technology that accounts for human values in a principled and comprehensive manner. VSD originated within the field of information systems design and human-computer interaction to address design issues within the fields by emphasizing the ethical values of direct and indirect stakeholders. It was developed by Batya Friedman and Peter Kahn at the University of Washington starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Later, in 2019, Batya Friedman and David Hendry wrote a book on this topic called "Value Sensitive Design: Shaping Technology with Moral Imagination". Value Sensitive Design takes human values into account in a well-defined matter throughout the whole process. Designs are developed using an investigation consisting of three phases: conceptual, empirical and technological. These investigations are intended to be iterative, allowing the designer to modify the design continuously.
Eric Joel Horvitz is an American computer scientist, and Technical Fellow at Microsoft, where he serves as the company's first Chief Scientific Officer. He was previously the director of Microsoft Research Labs, including research centers in Redmond, WA, Cambridge, MA, New York, NY, Montreal, Canada, Cambridge, UK, and Bangalore, India.
Elizabeth Frances Churchill is a British American psychologist specializing in human-computer interaction (HCI) and social computing. She is a Director of User Experience at Google. She has held a number of positions in the ACM including Secretary Treasurer from 2016 to 2018, and Executive Vice President from 2018 to 2020.
Gerhard Fischer is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, a Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science, and the founder and director of the Center for LifeLong Learning & Design (L3D) at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Victoria Bellotti is a Senior CI researcher in the Member Experience Team at Netflix. Previously, she was a user experience manager for growth at Lyft and a research fellow at the Palo Alto Research Center. She is known for her work in the area of personal information management and task management, but from 2010 to 2018 she began researching context-aware peer-to-peer transaction partner matching and motivations for using peer-to-peer marketplaces which led to her joining Lyft. Victoria also serves as an adjunct professor in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering at University of California Santa Cruz, on the editorial board of the Personal and Ubiquitous Computing and as an associate editor for the International Journal of HCI. She is a researcher in the Human–computer interaction community. In 2013 she was awarded membership of the ACM SIGCHI Academy for her contributions to the field and professional community of human computer interaction.
S. Joy Mountford is known for her work in the field of computer-human interaction and interface design. From 1986 to 1994, she was Head of the Human Interface Group at Apple Computer where she helped in developing QuickTime. In 2012, Mountford won the Lifetime Practice Award from SIGCHI and joined the CHI Academy.
Design fiction is a design practice aiming at exploring and criticising possible futures by creating speculative, and often provocative, scenarios narrated through designed artifacts. It is a way to facilitate and foster debates, as explained by futurist Scott Smith: "... design fiction as a communication and social object creates interactions and dialogues around futures that were missing before. It helps make it real enough for people that you can have a meaningful conversation with".
Wendy Elizabeth Mackay is a Canadian researcher specializing in human-computer interaction. She has served in all of the roles on the SIGCHI committee, including Chair. She is a member of the CHI Academy and a recipient of a European Research Council Advanced grant. She has been a visiting professor in Stanford University between 2010 and 2012, and received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award in 2014.
Susan M. Dray is an American human-computer interaction (HCI) and user experience (UX) professional who is a member of the CHI academy and the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA). Dray is known for her work in the field of UX design and is also a founding member of SIGCHI, the Association for Computing Machinery's special interest group for human-computer interaction.
Sharon Oviatt is an internationally recognized computer scientist, professor and researcher known for her work in the field of human–computer interaction on human-centered multimodal interface design and evaluation.
Meredith Ringel Morris is an American computer scientist whose contributions span HCI and AI research, including contributions in gesture interaction design, computer-supported cooperative work, information retrieval, accessible technologies and human-centered AI. She is a principal scientist and director at Google DeepMind and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington in The Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and in The Information School.
Jofish Kaye is an American and British scientist specializing in human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. He supports the Innovation Enablement team's research function as principal scientist at Wells Fargo, and previously ran interaction design and user research teams at anthem.ai and at Mozilla.
Today is World Usability Day, a day to promote intuitive engineering and user-friendly design. Commentator and humorist Tim Bedore is all for it, if only we could come up with a better name . . .