World Usability Day

Last updated
World Usability Day
Auditorio Universidad de la Salle (World Usability Day).jpg
World Usability Day presentation at La Salle University, Columbia
Also calledMake Things Easier Day
DateSecond Thursday in November
2023 dateNovember 9  (2023-11-09)
2024 dateNovember 14  (2024-11-14)
2025 dateNovember 13  (2025-11-13)
2026 dateNovember 12  (2026-11-12)
Frequencyannual

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 member, 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:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jakob Nielsen (usability consultant)</span> American computer scientist and usability professional (born 1957)

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">User interface design</span> Planned operator–machine interaction

User interface (UI) design or user interface engineering is the design of user interfaces for machines and software, such as computers, home appliances, mobile devices, and other electronic devices, with the focus on maximizing usability and the user experience. In computer or software design, user interface (UI) design primarily focuses on information architecture. It is the process of building interfaces that clearly communicate to the user what's important. UI design refers to graphical user interfaces and other forms of interface design. The goal of user interface design is to make the user's interaction as simple and efficient as possible, in terms of accomplishing user goals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Citadel/UX</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Presentation–abstraction–control</span>

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.

End-user development (EUD) or end-user programming (EUP) refers to activities and tools that allow end-users – people who are not professional software developers – to program computers. People who are not professional developers can use EUD tools to create or modify software artifacts and complex data objects without significant knowledge of a programming language. In 2005 it was estimated that by 2012 there would be more than 55 million end-user developers in the United States, compared with fewer than 3 million professional programmers. Various EUD approaches exist, and it is an active research topic within the field of computer science and human-computer interaction. Examples include natural language programming, spreadsheets, scripting languages, visual programming, trigger-action programming and programming by example.

User experience design 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. 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 aspects and stages of a customer's experience and interaction with a company.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Human–computer interaction</span> Academic discipline studying the relationship between computer systems and their users

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth F. Churchill</span> Psychologist

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marti Hearst</span> American computer scientist

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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.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mormedi</span>

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References

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