January 21, 2009
By Gülay Birand
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World Usability Day
I’ll admit it’s been a couple of months since World Usability Day, however my new site was not up and running so I didn’t get to blog about it and share my thoughts on the event.
This year’s theme was “Transportation” and it’s just proof that good design and usability are needed in any interface we use, regardless of the context. I often have a hard time explaining the breadth of my field to those who are not in it and it’s always great to have concrete examples to share. From clever things like welcome mats that line up with train doors to yellow stripes on grip poles inside the trains for those with lower vision, there were many great design and usability inspirations. Perhaps one way to define my field (Human-Centered Design and Engineering) is that we make things better, easier and more intuitive to make use of. I truly enjoyed all of the talks but that ones that stood out to me were “Inside the car: Understanding User Needs and User Experience Challenges” as well as “Travelling to the Future – New User Interface Techniquee – Making Life Easier.” The common thread between the two was harnessing our haptic and auditory senses rather than simply using our vision. Especially where our senses are on overload (driving is a great example here) and we are in resource-constrained environments, technologies that can address our needs within these constraints are becoming more and more important. Afterwards, we all got an opportunity to check out Microsoft Surface for ourselves. I was a bit disappointed that it was not pressure sensitive. It only senses movement via cameras and responds accordingly. For instance, the drums in it’s music application do not respond to how hard or soft I was playing them but simply that I was playing them.
Along with my friend Bre, I was also among the lucky winners at the raffle and received a Mac goodie bag containing Office 08 for Mac among other things. All in all, it was a great time and I just wish there were more frequent events like this.
