ABOUT US

Making life easier.

World Usability Day is single day of events occurring around the world that brings together communities of professional, industrial, educational, citizen, and government groups for our common objective: to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use.

It is about celebration and education—celebrating the strides we have made in creating usable products and educating the masses about how usability impacts our daily lives. It is about making our world work better. It is about reaching out to the common citizen and spreading the message: We don’t have to put up with products and services that don’t work well and that human error is a misnomer.

No one should have to suffer through products and services that get in their way. People should not be made to feel stupid by technology.

INCLUSION THROUGH USER EXPERIENCE

The world is changing and the climate of well-balanced and open society is not as prevalent as many of us would like. Technology is developing alongside new political changes. This is a pivotal moment in history and we can help shape the course of events by the work we do.

Well-designed user experiences allow for the uniqueness of people’s different strengths and beliefs to co-exist in a place of similarity and common ground. Tools and technologies that embrace similarities to tap into the potential of all people creates conditions that promote people to be their best selves, to cultivate and nurture people will produce better outcomes in all we do.

World Usability Initiative (WUI, pronounced “we”)

Director and Board President: Elizabeth Rosenzweig

Vice-President: Elizabeth Churchill

Secretary: AJ Davis

Board : Deborah Bosley, Shaimaa Lazem, Zhengjie Liu, Clemens Lutsch, Brian K. Smith, Constantine Stephanidis

The world is changing rapidly, with technology playing a key role in expanding opportunities. The HCI and UX communities have already had profound influence on successful technologies such as mobile devices, but now we seek to shape the social, cultural, economic, and environmental futures by the work we do.

The HCI/UX community has since their beginnings had a huge impact in shaping widely used technologies. Now is the time to link this successful community more directly to global initiatives such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. To that end, we propose combining the work of our professional organizations (i.e. SIGCHI, HCII, and World Usability Day) to create a focused worldwide organization to lead researchers, developers and companies to create technology that is user and value centered. This, the World Usability Initiative (WUI), will be combined with the United Nations work, specifically in regard to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.

WUI will provide researchers and practitioners the ability to not only shape and create how people interact with technology, but also influence the development of technologies that are intentionally designed to have a positive impact on people’s lives.

We understand that to focus our work on the greater good, we need a strategy that will raise awareness of and increase the level of HCI-UX impact on world technology, products and services. Our detailed goals and tactics can be found here.