October/November 2006

Volume 47, Number 2

World Usability Day: November 14, 2006

World Usability Day is for everyone who’s ever asked, “Why doesn’t this work right?” or “What am I supposed to do with this now?” The day is a collection of local activities that help raise awareness of usability engineering and user-centered design on a worldwide scale.

“World Usability Day raises interest in usability and helps people realize there are professionals out there who can tell you why products don’t work well—and most likely, how to fix it,” says Rahel Bailie, who, along with Jerome Ryckborst, is a co-chair of STC’s World Usability Day committee. Awareness is generated by media coverage and the sheer volume of local events that volunteers and local coordinators organize around the world.

This year, STC is contributing in two ways.

First, STC is collaborating with other organizations, such as the Usability Professionals’ Association, to determine how to create a meaningful usability competition that usability professionals can use to showcase their work and demonstrate to the world what good processes look like. To be a part of the team that helps shape competition criteria, you can register at www.stc.org/wud.

STC is also sponsoring an online card-sorting event—unusual because of its international scope—with the intent of raising the profile of STC members who work in the usability field. “There’s a growing group of STC members who have usability engineering skills and who make their living with user-centered design,” Ryckborst says, adding, “STC can help raise their profile within the usability community by participating in World Usability Day.”

Card sorting is a common analysis technique used to group objects in order to understand how users categorize information. Card sorting is best known for its use by information architects and usability professionals to find latent structure among menu items, Web pages, and the like. However, card sorting has been used, with equal effectiveness, to help find latent structure for book content to create a table of contents. “I recommend this technique to all my clients,” says Bailie, president of Intentional Design, Inc., “as it not only gets results faster, but also takes away some of the mystery and creates some transparency about the technical communication process.” Those who have never participated in a card sorting exercise can try a demo at www.websort.net.

STC’s project is meant to be a collaborative undertaking that will bring together the strengths of the various professions involved in structuring information toward better usability. By bringing together usability engineers, information architects, technical communicators, and taxonomists to collaborate on the project, STC’s World Usability Day committee hopes to create a card sort that will yield results of interest to our collective memberships worldwide. The committee expects the project will have universal relevance and allow examination of variances such as cultural and regional response differences.

STC is inviting chapters in every possible time zone and geographic area to sign up to participate, to create an experience that will be not only informative and educational, but also fun. You can contribute to World Usability Day by adding an event of your own, or by participating in this international research project. Sign up to be part of the organizing committee or register your group to participate at www.stc.org/wud.

World Usability Day is spearheaded by the Usability Professionals’ Association and sponsored by Intuit, SAP, TechSmith, and Apogee.

Source: Intercomm, September/October 2006. Used with permission of the Society for Technical Communication.