World Usability Day - Lori Webb, Indspark!, WUD Committee Member at Large

This year’s Designing for a Sustainable Life is a critical theme with implications not only for
improved individual user experience, but also for the collective state of the future of our planet.

To my mind, both usability and sustainability are intricately intertwined. When you literally take
usability out of sustainability, stain is what remains. And by eliminating sustainability from
usability it seizes to exist.

SUSTAINABILITY‐USABILITY= S TAIN (STAIN)

USABILITY‐ SUSTAINABILITY=

The stain that remains in usability‐free sustainability is products, services and experiences
discarded due to difficulty of use, disproportionate time consumption, user frustration and the
increase of more viable alternatives.

21st century user experience demands a more holistic approach to our thinking in regard to user
experience. As corporate social responsibility began taking hold in the late 90’s and continues to
grow in prevalence and importance for companies and consumer commitment to their brands,
personal commitment has also increased. It is a century that has been made aware of the threat
to its’ own livelihood and accordingly has begun to react by embracing movements such as Fair
Trade, buying organic and offsetting CO2 omissions. Therefore, I believe it goes to follow that to
be considered usable and of positive quality to the user experience issues of sustainability must
also be factored into the end result of our user experiences.

A century of excess and much imbalance, the last century saw many products and services
shortsightedly created with the intent to be either sustainable or usable but often lacking an
adequate combination of both. The result is an endless amount of poorly designed, unsustainable
or both outcomes. Today, the flourish of this poor practice is still evidenced throughout our
homes, offices, stores, schools, streets, bodies and environment. It is the clutter, the refuge, the
stress, the poor health, the new epidemics, the social conflicts, the eroding state of the planet, the
extinction of species and the poor environment. The experience is costing us dearly and in order
to turn it around we must actively engage in new ways of thinking and enlist more inclusive
approaches as we go about the design of the 21st century. By creating products, services and
experiences that are socially engaged, environmentally responsible and economically viable we
create conscious design that is as vital to the user experience today as emotional design was a
decade ago.