World Usability Day 2009 – a (months late) recap

March 17, 2010

I was so late on getting this out that I wasn’t going to send this out. Then I read @patrickrhone ’s status update last week and decided just because it’s late doesn’t mean I shouldn’t post.

World Usability Day is an annual event created by the Usability Professional’s Association. This year, the event, or rather, events, were held on November 12th. Across the globe, hundreds of chapters hosted various events (for a listing of these events visit http://www.worldusabilityday.org ). The theme this year was “Designing for a Sustainable World.”

I had the privilege of chairing the event this year for our local chapter in Minneapolis, UPA MN. As a board, we discussed several options on how to approach the event. We also had two sessions with people interested in helping out with the event. Our amazing UPA MN chapter president Suzanne Currie, started connecting with people in the sustainability arenas. What we quickly realized was that Minnesota has quite an array of heavy hitters in this broad field. And we wanted to tap into that.

We decided to go big and hope for the best. We didn’t want one speaker, hell we didn’t want one track. So we lined up the speakers (and by ‘we’ I mean ‘Suzanne’, she brought in some terrific speakers) and hoped to have enough attendees to make two tracks worthwhile.

Along the way, we decided to make this a low-waste event as well and walk the talk as it were. We had Chowgirls do the catering, they provided compostable garbage bags, cutlery, and glasses. The only water we offered was tap, not bottled. The wine was from a sustainable, zero carbon winery, and for beer, we chose a local brewery, Grain Belt.

After a few brainstorming sessions on how to tie it all together, we focused on sustainability as a series of choices we make every day, a day-in-the-life. From taking a shower, eating your meals, getting to work, buying goods, going to the hospital, all these seemingly mundane events are really a series of choices that can be made to live a more sustainable lifestyle.

If you’ve stayed with me this far, you may be wondering “this sounds great but what does it have to do with design?” The answer it turns out is “a lot”. Several of the speakers discussed the importance of (a) making people aware of the choices to be made and (b) making the sustainable option a preferred option. How? Through improving the user experience of these choices. Energy companies have seen customers improving their conservation through small changes such as smiley faces on their bill when consumption went down compared to other households. Best Buy has seen recycling of appliances and TV’s go up dramatically; they made it easier for the customers to do.

I was incredibly nervous two weeks before the event, we only had 8 confirmed attendees. But over the final week the RSVP’s steadily came in, and we had over 70 attendees (this seems to be a Minnesota thing, as it happens at other events besides UPA). We had several posters showing sustainable options for architecture as well as product design. And two of our volunteers put together a terrific series of pictures showing a day-in-the-life in America compared to Africa. We put this up along a wall with sticky notes for people to write down problem statements and ideas for solving the problem. This spurred some great conversations.

Ultimately, an event like this rises and falls with the speakers, and our speakers took the event to great heights. A special thanks goes out to Suzanne Currie who is so good at connecting people and sought out most of our speakers.

One of the speakers, I forget which one, said, you can only go down a certain path so far before you cannot go back. You cannot un-learn the consequences of our actions once you learn them. My hope is that in some small way for a group of people, we helped go a little further down that path. And my ambition is that the user experience field finds ways large and small, not just on World Usability Day, to engage in promoting sustainable choices in how we live our lives.

Posted in Design