World Usability Day

Today was World Usability Day. As the website puts it:

It's about "Making Life Easy" and user friendly. Technology today is too hard to use. A cell phone should be as easy to access as a doorknob. In order to humanize a world that uses technology as an infrastructure for education, healthcare, transportation, government, communication, entertainment, work and other areas, we must develop these technologies in a way that serves people first…

World Usability Day was founded in 2005 as an initiative of the Usability Professionals' Association to ensure that services and products important to human life are easier to access and simpler to use.

A nearby event was put on by local user experience consultancy User Vision, and I've just got back from a very interesting few hours there.

A really interesting presentation by Monty Lilburn introduced us to Loadstone GPS - open source software that utilises GPS on mobile phones, resulting in easy-to-follow directions of significant use to blind and visually impaired people (through the use of mobile screen readers such as Talks or Mobile Speak). We were also shown a great little video that they had made, showing Lilburn navigating his way through Edinburgh using the software on his phone. It can (for now) be seen at www.tinyurl.com/6cukzt.

Elsewhere we saw a demonstration of eye-tracking software, which User Vision's Jamie advocated as a very powerful tool able to give you some very meaningful results; Donna was letting people get their hands on her iPhone to see how easy to use it is (or isn't); Ross was giving people a driving test challenge with the latest in iTV software; and I had an interesting chat with their accessibility consultant Mark about everything from WCAG 2.0 to the lack of a decent legal precedent in the UK which would help underline the importance of accessibility standards.

Thanks to Chris, Laura and everyone else at User Vision for an interesting afternoon.

Update - User Vision now have a press release about the day on their website, along with some useful links and a handful on photos (including one of the back of my head!).