My friend, Kim Krause Berg, reminded us all that today, November 8, is World Usability Day. As the official website proclaims, “World Usability Day was founded to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use.” Looking back over the last two years since I last blogged on this, to be frank I don’t think the message is getting across. Companies still produce products and services that they believe will be right for us, and so often they clearly were never tested by real life prospects before they were released.
That’s perhaps why Kim in the Cre8asite Forums started a thread entitled, Are We Designing For The Human Experience? It was triggered by a post about DUX 2007. This is a conference for designers working on better user experiences. As Bob Jacobson of Total Experience wrote “A great conference, but fundamentally off the mark“. The forum discussion was most interesting but unfortunately seemed to confirm that UX (user experience) is not being handled in a very effective way.
A key concern is whether there is anything going on that will allow us to celebrate significant success by World Usability Day 2008. I’m not optimistic.
Related: World Usability Day 2005 – Making It Easy!