UAE Usability Meeting
by christmassms
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Meeting in UAE at usability meeting was really fantastic, its on early stages here in UAE. Motivating people to purchase usable products for future, i-e can be recycled future is a great effort, I am truly inspired by the motives of the organization. Thanks
Meeting in UAE was a starting point for me after joining UPA
by gittar1122
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Yesterday I was looking last year photos at an event of UPA in UAE, it was a first meeting after I joined UPA. Making the products usable for future was the motivating factor to join hands with UPA. Resources are becoming scarce day by day, we need to design those product which can be recycled to its shape. In that event it was decided to start a campaign in UAE to make people aware about usability products and how can we save on it. That was simply a great event for me. There were SEM experts. Thanks Regards,
World Usability Day 2009 in NYC
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The NYC Usability Professionals Association -- http://nycupa.org -- and the NYC chapter of IxDA thank all the people, speakers, and sponsors who were a part of the World Usability Day event in NYC. Follow us at http://twitter.com/nycupa and http://twitter.com/ixda_NYC
First to speak was Peter Mullan, Director of Planning, of Friends of the Highline (http://thehighline.org). The public park, which opened in June 2009, is built on a restored section of elevated railroad tracks in NYC's Meatpacking District. In addition to injecting a dose of nature in an urban area, the park promotes reuse and provides communal space. While the land under the tracks is owned by over twenty separate property owners and the NYC government, Friends of the High Line won them over by showing how ROI could be higher than development costs.
The second panel featured entrepreneurs from Pratt's Design Incubator for Sustainable Innovation, a local university program. Each entrepreneur described their business, which all focused on sustainability as a core part of their customer value prop. Examples are consulting (Cerca), furniture development (Domestic Aesthetic), and solar/wind energy collectors (SMIT). Learn more about Pratt's Design Incubator: http://CSDS.pratt.edu
Other business success stories presented include Bamboo Bike Studio and Verterra. The former offers $1300, two-day, build-a-bike-with-bamboo workshops. The latter manufactures and sells sustainable servingware. Both businesses are examples that for individual consumers, purpose can beat the cheapest option.
For WUD 09, the San Diego HFES chapter produced a brochure about gray water usage and how it can benefit the local community.
World Usability Day 2009
The San Diego chapter produced a pamphlet in print and electronic format that answers frequently asked questions about gray water and conveys how it can benefit the local community. The pamphlet contains a virtual link to current information on the laws governing residential gray water harvesting. There is also information regarding the purchase, installation, and maintenance of residential gray water harvesting systems.
The reality is that installing a gray water system is neither difficult nor expensive. A basic system uses a bucket to capture shower water which can then be re-used in the garden to water plants. A more sophisticated system, for example, requires 1) the installation of a filter in the drain line below a sink and 2) a connection to a toilet. Once the gray water is filtered, it is automatically diverted to the toilet where it is stored. The gray water is re-used when the toilet is flushed. With regional shortages facing the San Diego community, recycling water is as important as ever.
The kit will be available in on-line format at http://www.sdhfes.org beginning on November 12, 2009. It will also be available as a printed brochure via request at Gray Water Kit, c/o 9180 Brown Deer Road, San Diego, CA 92122 or by calling 858-535-1661.
Standby Guy conquers Belgium!
To celebrate World Usability Day, Human Interface Group wanted to help Belgian companies making their technology more efficient and more profitable. More than 40 companies asked for a Standby Guy and it was a tough job selecting!
On November 12th, 20 Standby Guys visited 20 Belgian companies to help them with their websites, intranets, software, business processes, user documentation, and all other user related stuff.
How did the Standby Guys make Belgium more profitable?
* “We have had an energetic, productive, hands-on, and fun day together that was interesting for both parties.”
* “As a Standby Guy, I handed Acerta loads of practical ideas that could easily be implemented in IT projects and in IT project management. The aim? Making Acerta’s desktop and web applications user-friendly, right from the start – thus saving development and re-development costs, OR time and money, in the end!”
* “On november 12th, this standby guy made sure future students will experience no obstacles in finding their way to the courses at Karel de Grote-Hogeschool. A perfect win-win situation for the students and the school itself.”
* “As a Standby Guy, my work will certainly help to make a visit at Nieuwsblad.be an even more enjoyable experience. It will be so much easier for readers to sign up and receive their favorite newspaper’s newsletter."
* “Thanks to the standby guy, Eurocross now knows that there are methods and tools to use in the development process of their new application to improve the user experience. If they choose to follow that path, the students that start at Eurocross in 2011 will have an application that is intuïtive and doesn’t need 4 days of training."
Anecdotes
Curitiba - Brazil celebrates World Usability Day 2009
Curitiba celebrated the World Usability Day with 3 talkings: Priscilla Lepre, Claudio Pereira and MediaLab - Universidade Positivo. The university was full of students, professionals and researchers in and outside Curitiba.
The event was broadcast online and was a success.
Photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/efileno/WUD2009Curitiba
Presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/efileno/wud2009-curitiba
Vancouver "Sunup to Sundown design slam" a success!
by catsanders
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At 8am on Nov 12th our team came together in support of the Pine St. Community Garden. For the next 12 hours 8 UX Professionals applied their skills and enthusiasm to how to make the garden a great community experience. Check out the deck we presented last night to VanUE (http://www.slideshare.net/gordonr/vanue-world-usability-day-2009) and short clip of the day (http://www.vimeo.com/7688451).
Michigan World Usability Day Conference at Michigan State University
Michigan State University's Usability & Accessibility Center hosted the Michigan World Usability Day 2009 conference, featuring a special session on contemporary issues of information technology in the sustainable global knowledge economy. Other presentations included sustainability and agility for designing eForms, hybrid car usability, eGovernment for a sustainable community, an assistive technology expo, and an accessibility workshop on WCAG 2.0, ARIA, and AJAX. The Michigan chapter of the Usability Professionals' Association joined MSU in this year's event, offering attendees an exciting opportunity to participate in a live usability evaluation of alarm clocks.
The Michigan event drew over 150 designers, developers, usability and accessibility specialists, IT corporate and government professionals, as well as community planners and academics interested in usability, user-centered design, accessibility, and HCI. MSU's Libraries, Computing & Technology division was the Platinum sponsor. Detailed program information about the conference is available at http://usability.msu.edu.
World Usability Day @ Redweb
Usability is for life not just for World Usability Day
With the smugness of a team given it’s own international day of celebration we swaggered into the studio yesterday filled with festive cheer, for it was World Usability Day (or WUD09) and no one was going to put team UX in the corner.
WUD09, the Redweb way
Instead of looking at sustainability on a global or social level we focused our efforts on the sustainability of usability and user experience (UX) within our own company. Although Redweb has followed a user centric design process for a long time, the UX team as a separate entity is still relatively new and within a company nearing triple figures it’s important for us to ensure that everyone is aware of the role we play and what we’re capable of.
An open invite was put out and cake was ordered. To highlight the diversity of UX as a discipline attendees were invited to put together a 5 minute presentation, BarCamp style, of how user experience impacted on them and how integral it is to what we do. With people queueing out the door there was no shortage of participants.
http://blog.redweb.com/2009/11/13/usability-is-for-life-not-just-for-wor...
Sustainability Director, Leilani Latimer, Discusses Intitiatives at Sabre Holdings
Watch the exclusive video.
