Usability is for life not just for World Usability Day
With the smugness of a team given it’s own international day of celebration we swaggered into the studio yesterday filled with festive cheer, for it was World Usability Day (or WUD09) and no one was going to put team UX in the corner.
For the uninitiated, each year the second Thursday of November is officially World Usability Day, an initiative created to “ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use.” Last year, with the focus set on Transport, more than 40,000 people in 180 cities in over 40 countries participated. This years theme was ‘sustainability’.
WUD09, the Redweb way
Instead of looking at sustainability on a global or social level we focused our efforts on the sustainability of usability and user experience (UX) within our own company. Although Redweb has followed a user centric design process for a long time, the UX team as a separate entity is still relatively new and within a company nearing triple figures it’s important for us to ensure that everyone is aware of the role we play and what we’re capable of.
An open invite was put out and cake was ordered. To highlight the diversity of UX as a discipline attendees were invited to put together a 5 minute presentation, BarCamp style, of how user experience impacted on them and how integral it is to what we do. With people queueing out the door there was no shortage of participates.
Subject varied from visualising the user experience through rapid prototyping, through to data analytics, web optimisation and onto search engine optimisation.
It was a great opportunity to open up discussion across the company, celebrate WUD09 as well as welcome Rob Murray, our new Social Media Specialist, to the team.
Goody bag
World Usability Day acted as a great platform to strike up a dialogue and get everyone thinking. It was encouraging to see the level of enthusiasm and what was planned as a one off event is looking like it’ll become a regular gathering.
If the day was focused on sustainability I have no fears for the longevity of usability. It has become an integral part of any project process and can no longer be excluded or separated out; it’s in the hands of designers, developers, analysts, account teams to name but a few.
With a new year on the horizon and WUD09 over focus turns to the future of UX. For me its about making sure everything we create is measurable and evolves to meet the needs of the key users, but that’s for another blog post. For now thanks goes to everyone who took part yesterday and to the organisers of World Usability Day for providing a focal point, and Asda for not knowing the difference between an A5 cake and an A3 sized one.
Visit the World Usability Day website if you’d like to know more. Alternatively, if you’d like to see some photos from the Redweb party take a look on Flickr.
