World Usability Day

World Usability Day was founded to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use. WUD focuses on raising awareness and visibility of usability and user centered design and is organized every year by volunteers and local event coordinators from around the world.

Whether usability professionals or just enthusiastic (or frustrated) users, each participant makes a contribution to "making life easy".

Usability and its Impact in Making Better Public Services– Bangalore, November 05, 2007

On Nov 5, 2007, World Usability Day will be hosted at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. The event is being organized and supported by UPA Bangalore, CHI Bangalore, leading usability companies, IISC Bangalore and usability enthusiasts. The event will include designers, technologists, business professionals, students and is open to public.

WUD Bangalore 2007 will focus on applying ‘usability’ and ‘design’ thinking to making life easier and more usable for the common man (us!) in India. Among other areas the event will focus on Healthcare, Education, and Government Services and other public services and utilities that touch our lives everyday. It will include how Information and Communication Technologies and services can make this happen.

When and Where?
Date: Monday, 05 November, 2007, Time: 4.00 pm to 7.30 pm
Venue: Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

How to register and participate
Register directly here

( Wiki Password: usability )

NY Times class us 'Technology's Untanglers'

According to this article (requires signup):

"Sometimes there is a huge disconnect between the people who make a product and the people who use it. The creator of a Web site may assume too much knowledge on the part of users, leading to confusion. Software designers may not anticipate user behavior that can unintentionally destroy an entire database. Manufacturers can make equipment that inadvertently increases the likelihood of repetitive stress injuries. Enter the usability professional, whose work has recently developed into a solid career track, driven mostly by advancements in technology."

EyePoint

Now that was a a rather long absence from blogging and after my trip I got a bit caught up in work...

Now, this is something interesting that caught my eye, rather literally. EyePoint is a project by Manu Kumar, Andreas Paepcke and Terry Winograd at Stanford which uses the user's gaze to augment mouse based interactions. This is something I have found wanting especially when working with design tools on a multi-monitor setup. I usually have the screen set on one screen and the tools on the other and having to move from screen to other does take a long time, if the system were to use my gaze to make predictive cursor movement.

You can check out the website which has a YouTube video on it, and also read the paper on it...

Easy7 Bangalore

Yesterday, I was at Easy 7, India's 7th Annual National Conference on Advanced User Interface Practices, at The Leela Palace in Bangalore. A nice, compact conference that featured four speakers speaking on six topics. Surya Vanka from Microsoft was speaking on Design innovation and innovation culture, Sarah Bloomer, touched up on UI tools and about converting research into design, Bill Scott of Yahoo! touched upon AJAX UI patterns, while Jeremy Ashley spoke on selling design within the organization. The topics were interesting but somehow there was a feeling the speakers had to hurry things up as the time alloted for each presentation seemed limited. But the effort on CHI South India's part was quite good, and here's looking forwared to Easy8.

PS: Bill Scott has an update on the event and also a link to his talk presentations

Making compact forms accessible. But why?

Mike Brittain in his ALA article talks about making compact forms accessible. Before reading his article I was not aware of a UI pattern of using 'compact forms' (pardon my ignorance) but apparently it is an oft used technique, which actually worries me a lot. I've seen forms where there are sample inputs provided and those too are something I believe is a bit of a nuisance. But in this case, the field label itself appears as the form field value. This must be mighty confusing to the user. Anybody has any experience designing these kinds of forms?