WELLINGTON, New Zealand, Nov. 10, 2010 — If you've ever got lost in a cascade of telephone prompts, gone to the wrong gate at the airport or had trouble installing a printer driver, then World Usability Day, Thursday, November 11th, is for you.
Each year the Usability Professionals Association and their friends try to go out there and "make life easier" for you. It's grown into a huge movement that will see over 144 events in more than 43 countries this year. The aim of this year's World Usability Day is to create greater awareness for designs, products and services that improve and facilitate communication around the world.
Last year OptimalWorkshop.com spent the week before the big day pulling together a special set of tools to help user experience (known in the community as UX) designers all over the world find out more easily what their users think.
This year OptimalWorkshop.com has spent a month getting 8 leading UX tools companies from across the US, and as far-flung as Australia and New Zealand, to contribute to a bundle of tools that help web developers refine and redesign their websites to make them easier to use. Hopefully it will be a win for us all.
"Building on the success of our debut bundle last year, and on this year's World Usability Day theme of Communication, we've gone out and partnered with a great bunch of companies from around the world and pulled together what we've dubbed the 'Redesign Bonanza Super Bundle' for this year's World Usability Day," says Andrew Mayfield, CEO, Optimal Workshop. "We've been overwhelmed by the value contributed by each partner and are excited about how much easier the world will be to live in once all our customers start using this unprecedented package of UX pro tools!"
Committed to making products that people can use to make life easier, particularly life on the web, Mayfield says, "We've taken our years of experience in usability consulting at OptimalUsability.com and condensed it into a suite of usability study tools. These are the same tools we use in our daily work to help us efficiently improve the usability, findability and user satisfaction associated with our clients' websites and intranets around the world."
A quick scan of the special page set up for the day makes it easy to see how the complementary tools can be used together to make websites easier to use: there's a whole collection of usability books, different flavors of survey and user recruitment tools so that the voice of the customer can come through loud and clear, and several tools focused on usability testing, both remote and in-person to ensure that site designs are on the right track.
The bundle is only available on World Usability Day and can be viewed here:
It's nice to see that there are so many people working on making the world an easier place to live in. If there's a website that you have to use, but don't love to use, maybe take the time to tell them about World Usability Day and subtly suggest they may need to update their toolkit.
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