World Usability Day 2006 : 14th November 2006

Just a quick note, for those who would have skipped this, 14th november is the World Usability Day.
I’ll be there in Paris, but check local events near you on this page :
http://www.worldusabilityday.org/event/countries

Plenty of interresting stuff (and people) in there...

Now what exactly is this event all about ?

What is World Usability Day?

Why doesn’t this work right? What am I supposed to do with this now?”. This is an Earth-Day-style event, focused on easy-to-use technology, which last year involved 115 events in 35 countries.

World Usability Day promotes the value of usability engineering, user-centered design, and every user’s right to ask for things that work better.

The Usability Professionals’ Association is doing that by encouraging, organizing, and sponsoring 36 hours of activities at the local level around the globe, all occurring on November 14, 2006.

This event will hopefully help me follow up on this :

Quote from: davidm at Nov 05, 2006, 09:29 AM

Usability most definitely is one area where CMS are lacking. Be sure we are working on this and have plans to make a significant leap with MODx 1.0. I don’t know if you checked the OpenUsability project and more particularly the CMS User Interface Guidelines, but we did and we’ll definitely have and will give a lot of thoughts about this. I’d very much like to involve a usability expert at some point, and I happen to know one of the best guys around in France (Fred Cavazza, his blog is one of the top 10 french blogs and organizing the french World Usability Day -> I’ll be there in Paris on November 14th) which I’ll hopefully convince to give us a hand there.

I intend to have a nice chat with those usability guys (particularly Fred) and get their take on CMS usability, maybe convince them to give a look at MODx and give us some usability pointers.

I’ll keep you posted about this

I hadn’t heard of this.

I’m always slightly wary of the expertisation of usability, and phrases like "key questions to ask your usability supplier" (on the sponsor’s site) make my skin crawl - although not as much as the phrase "Earth-Day-style event"!

Earth Day doesn’t promote the hiring of Planetary Resource Advocates or the value of independent expertise in The Environment, it just exists as an awareness campaign.

But still, whatever can be done to co-opt the message of usability and align MODx with these goals is good.

I understand your reticences at buzzwords and promotionnal catch lines (those marketing guys are really something, aren’t they ?), but still I have seen Fred’s work and usability isn’t all smoke : it’s part common sense and web experience, but there are also knowledge areas (studies which range from eye-tracking and how humans perform various cognitive task on the web...etc) and methodological aspect (like user cases) which can really give some insight that you couldn’t get on your own.

I mean we can’t master all aspect of building web sites and web applications. There is a lot to learn from IA guys, HCI specialist and usability is one area of expertise where there might be few real experts (the others just surf the trend), but they do have added value. Right now, if you take the cms-uig work, it’s just starting (see their wiki) but it’s certainly commandable to try to think about ways to enhance web application’s usability.

I’m not knocking the field. The core certainly isn’t smoke, I believe fully in usability and the benefits of study, but some Usability Engineers come across more like big drug companies than people who just want everyone to be well.

The site you link to is called OpenUsability. Now *that’s* fantastic and truly commendable, and a step towards people being able to get valuable insight without paying trumped up consultancy fees. The UPA appears to be on the Closed Source side of usability. The sponsors include Oracle and SAP.. there’s a certain vibe at the World Usability Day and it seems light years apart from cms-uig. Actually, to be fair it looks like the European UPA chapters differ significantly.

I just don’t see usability as a distinct purchase. It should underpin everything.

OK I get your point here, it’s true I am seing things from down there and also it’s inevitable that new "disciplines" so to speak are only new markets for some people... can’t avoid that...