About UPA
Press Releases
World Usability Day- November 3, 2005: Events
Planned Around the World Will Showcase “Making It Easy”
Contact: Sue Leitner,
Prosperity Communications
513-520-6184
sleitner@fuse.net
(Chicago, Illinois: March 4,
2005) – The Usability Professionals’ Association is organizing
the first annual World Usability Day on November 3, 2005. This worldwide
series of events will promote awareness of the benefits of usability engineering
and user-centered design. Activities will be held at the local level all
over the world, and will be occurring on the same day. This year’s
focus is e-government, while also including commercial applications. The
theme is “Making It Easy.”
Several local UPA chapters and sister organizations worldwide have already
begun to coordinate participation in cities around the world, including
Boston; Chicago; Dallas-Ft. Worth; Hong Kong; Indianapolis; London; Minneapolis-St.
Paul; Montreal; New York City; Ottawa; Rome; Tel Aviv, and Zurich.
“Any event that brings user experience to the forefront of people’s
minds is a good event for World Usability Day,” says Elizabeth Rosenzweig,
Principal Research Scientist at Kodak, and Co-Chair of the event. “The
goal is to create a critical mass of enough interesting stories that will
capture the collective imagination of innovative people around the world.”
This international event will have a rolling timeline, documented on the
worldusabilityday.org website. The day will begin with events in Australasia,
and then move westward to end with an event at the DUX 2005 (Designing
for User Experiences) Conference in San Francisco.
“It is not enough to have and use new technology such as the Internet,
cell phones, PDAs, digital cameras and just accept that sometimes it does
not do what you want or thought it should,” says Rosenzweig. “People
need to see that technology is not driving us, but we are crafting and
using technology to serve us. It is an important and simple message. Technology
should always be usable.”
Any organization with an interest in improving user’s experience
of technology is invited to participate in this event. Details for participants
are available at www.worldusabilityday.org.
The Usability Professionals' Association is an international, non-profit, professional association with more than 2000 members in the US and 35 other countries. Members are specialists in evaluating and designing products that are easy to learn and use. The organization provides its members with a wide variety of professional services. Through outreach the UPA:
- Shares information about the skills and approach of usability professionals in meeting needs for usable products.
- Acts as an advocate for usability in consumer, corporate and governmental software, products and web sites.
- Educates the general public about the usability.
For more information, contact:
The Usability Professionals'
Association
140 N. Bloomingdale Rd.
Bloomingdale, IL 60108-1017
email: office@upassoc.org
web: http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org