Mercer Event for World Usability Day

Contact:              

Name                    Marjorie T. Davis, Ph.D.

Organization      Mercer University

 Phone number                478.301.2356

Email address    davis_mt@mercer.edu

 

 

Macon, GA, November 7, 2009: Visitors to Mercer University School of Engineering on Saturday, Nov. 7, saw what it means to make websites more usable. Mercer’s technical communication students demonstrated their state-of-the-art usability lab and showed high school students and their families how testing web portals improves usability. Interested visitors could participate to try out web portals themselves and provide feedback on ways to improve the user’s experience.

 

The World Usability Day event was just one of the lab experiences available to a large group of scholarship applicants to Mercer’s School of Engineering. The technical communication program is one of the premier programs in the country because of its location within engineering and strong technical foundations. Several Mercer graduates have completed graduate study in usability and instructional design at such institutions as Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Illinois, and Bentley College.

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. Each year, over 200 events are organized in over 43 countries around the world to raise awareness for the general public, and train professionals in the tools and issues central to good usability research, development and practice.

 

WUD is about making our world work better. 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.

 

Human-centered design also supports the environmental component through promoting a whole lifecycle approach to design. It explicitly encourages all those involved in design to consider the longer-term implications of their system for their users and therefore for the environment. (ISO DIS 9241-210) World Usability Day 2009 will serve as an impetus to creating greater awareness for designs, products and services that improve the sustainability of the world.