What is World Usability Day?

Everyone has experienced the frustration of trying to use a product or service that doesn’t work as it should or as you might expect. 

In order to highlight the importance of the user experience and promote the message of user friendly design World Usability Day was introduced. This Day aims to inform, illustrate and educate on the reasons to follow established user centered design principles for products and services and the benefits to customers and organizations alike that usable products & services bring.

For its seventh year in a row, User Vision will be supporting this annual event as an official partner – examining this year’s theme of Education: Designing for Social Change. We would like to extend our invitation to allow you to join us to explore how advances in technology new interaction methods and devices have affected and will continue to affect the user’s behavior, understanding and experience. 

What will the day involve?

As per our previous events, on the day we will be hosting a large variety of activities including live demonstrations, workshops and interactive tasks. The aim of the event is to highlight how usability impacts users’ change in social behavior as a result of learning new techniques for interaction and using new tools to perform actions

Some of the activities we have developed for you include:

• The BBC’s approach to accessibility and BS 8878: Hear a special discussion on the development of this web accessibility code of practice BS 8878 from our special guest speaker, Jonathan Hassell, our client from the BBC.
• Online engagement of offline brands: What makes for effective social media marketing when first impressions are critical?
• Co-operative prototype designing:  users involved in a ‘live’ iterative prototype design process to investigate the user experience outcomes, after all what you like or expect is what everyone else will like and expect – isn’t it?
• Does the medium effect the message?: Using a variety of methods this demonstration not only looks at user level of recall when using different devices, but also how they interact with each device using eye tracking technology. 

Event details

Venue:  User Vision, 55 North Castle Street, Edinburgh EH2 3QA

Date: Thursday 10th November 2011

Time: 2 to 6pm

Price:  Free!

Also on World Usability Day our colleagues in the User Vision Dubai office will be launching a photo competition inviting regional entrants to submit a picture on this year’s theme of “Designing for Social Change”. 

How to book

If you would like to attend, please sign up or call 0131 225 0858. It will be an 'open house' from 2.00pm to 6.00pm, so feel free to pop in and get involved in this unique and worthwhile experience. We will be serving light refreshments throughout the afternoon and the event is free! 

We hope you can join us!

See what happened at last year's World Usability Day event.