The Triangle

Issue date: 11/4/05 Section: Sci-Tech

Media Credit: Dennis Mongello

Ever get a new cell phone? Excitement rushes through you as you want to set it up and show it off to your friends. You start hammering away at the buttons and scrolling through the menus. However, that excitement quickly turns to frustration - "How do I use this thing?"

The field of usability strives to eliminate this consumer frustration, in all products, not just electronics. From the design of cell phones, Web sites, and the controls on your car radio, usability experts strive to create a user experience that allows for quick learning.

Nov. 3 marked the first annual World Usability Day. An initiative of the Usability Professional Association, World Usability Day hopes to call more attention to an area of technological design that is often neglected. People in over 80 locations in spread out over 30 countries celebrated the event in hopes of highlighting the importance of user-centered design and the responsibility of users to demand products that are intuitive - things that "Make it Easy" as the slogan for World Usability Day says.

The day featured events worldwide. It started off with a kickoff event in New Zealand marking the opening of New Zealand's first center completely devoted to information design and usability.

An organization called Usability Matters lead the effort in Hyderabad, India. As a part of the event, they held a Bad Design contest, in order call attention to the usability of everyday things.

For example, one entrant in the contest notes that the bus number is not displayed on the side of the bus, where it would be convenient to people on the side of the street to see. Another entry asks hotels give out plastic packets of shampoo that are near impossible to open with wet hands.

The United Kingdom will celebrate the day by giving out the 2005 UK Usability Professionals Awards. Categories include "Best Web site for Finding Information", "Best Website for Communication between Users", and "Best Software Application." The finalists for these awards are familiar names like GoogleMaps, Flickr, GMail, iTunes and Firefox.

The United States also held many events in Chicago, New York City and Philadelphia, including one right on the University's campus the featured Fidelity Investments Senior VP for Human Interface Design, Tom Tullis' talk entitled "Usability and the Evolution of Technology, or You Shouldn't Have to Read a User Manual to Ride an Elevator!" (See The Triangle Online for more information on this event).

In addition to the events that occurred around the world, a survey was conducted by Human Factors International to show how a simple thing like color can affect usability.

They asked users to pick the color they associate with banking Web sites, healthcare Web sites, news Web sites, online stores, beauty Web sites, electronics stores, and government Web sites. By understanding natural human color associations, a standard could be established. If this standard was used, Web sites could send intuitive signals via color to their users about what their Web site is about.

Several other events and teleconferences were held online, including discussions on usability for the disabled, accessibility on the web, and speech technologies.

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