I am about to conclude my professional doctorate in User-System Interaction in The Netherlands. During this almost 2 years, I never had the need to convince anyone about the importance usability. They teach that! Most of the time I was in the university, people there know what they can get from usability activities. However this scenario of the dreams always annoyed me. This is not real! Now I am doing my internship and – for many reasons – usability has its space in my project. This is not real again. When I heard last week someone saying that the budget of a certain project has to be directed to development, sales, marketing and everything else, but usability activities, I thought: “Wow! Here we go back to reality!”. Working in a context where everyone is aware about how important usability is, money is always available, recruitment is done smoothly and time is not a problem is a really boring workplace. In October I will get my brand new degree and I will be back to the market. Maybe the meeting last week was a sign that I am approaching the times where usability has to fight for its space. I look forward to start fighting again! \o/ For the teacher, instructors or anyone who teaches usability, my message is to think about this. Teach people how to deal with situations where usability is not the most important/valued/focused thing, because we all know the value of it, but we also know that we need much more than that to have a product!

World Usability Day edition 2010 is approaching. As every year, WUD has a theme that will lead the activities during that day. For this year communications is the theme. WUD 2010 will serve as an impetus to creating greater awareness for designs, products and services that improve and facilitate communications around the world. This year’s events and forums will focus on how products and services impact communications. Programs will examine all products and services used in the communication process including: cellular phones, mobile devices, social media, email, video, and perhaps other exciting technologies that may not have hit the mainstream!

If you never heard about World Usability Day, it was founded in 2005 as an initiative of the UPA to ensure that services and products important to human life are easier to access and simpler to use. Each year, on the second Thursday of November, over 200 events are organized in more than 40 countries around the world to raise awareness for the general public, and to train professionals in the tools and issues central to good usability research, development, and practice.

Let World Usability Day 2010 be your impetus to create greater awareness for designs, products and services that improve the sustainability of our world. Be the one to bring the word to your company and community this year. I strongly recommend you get involved in World Usability Day 2010! I have participated both as an attendant and as an organizer. Both experience were great! If you do not know what is planned to take place in your city, you should have a look at list of events programmed so far. If you do not find your city listed there, this should be your biggest motivation to find people close to you to organize the event in your city.

DIS’10 takes place in Aarhus (Denmark) between 16-20 August, 2010. We will attend it and I’ll be student volunteer there as well! \o/

You can have a look at the abstract of our paper below.

An increasing number of people report sleeping problems. In the present paper we describe Somnia: a system designed to support remote couples to fall asleep faster and to enhance their sleep quality. Following a user-centered design process, Somnia was designed and evaluated. Qualitative feedback after a two-week user study shows that Somnia succeeds in providing a sense of connectedness between partners when sleeping remotely. This sense of connectedness might lead to a more pleasant sleeping experience. Based on our findings we recommend designers of sleep related technologies to (a) incorporate the social aspects of sleep in their designs and (b) to focus on emotional arguments rather than rational arguments to influence sleeping habits.

In the future I will post our presentation here!

Design thinking is the concept underneath the whole book and is the topic that has inspired me recently. I hope you have the opportunity to read it!

frog design developed a study for Forbes exploring how the world will be in 2020. The result, you will find in this website. And more information about the whole project you can find in frog website. Enjoy this really cool study!

Thirty one usability labs from all over the world, all recently built and in active use, take you on a photographic tour and show you how they designed their rooms, what equipment they use, and which software tools are used for data collection and analysis. The usability lab photo gallery covers a wide range of application domains, organizations and technology: from desktop software to mobile applications, from healthcare to military systems, from consumer electronics to office hardware, from focus groups and qualitative testing to physiological measurements and eye tracking, from corporate to educational facilities, from stationary to portable labs. Enjoy the tours!

http://www.noldus.com/labs

The User System Interaction (USI) Programme was founded by the Stan Ackermans Institute in the Technical University of Eindhoven (TU/e), the Netherlands. It is a two-year post-graduate programme leading to the degree of `Professional Doctorate in Engineering` (PDeng). The User System Interaction post-graduate programme requires an internationally recognized master degree. The content of the curriculum is regulated by staff of the university from different faculties working in the field of USI and HCI and is carried out by nationally and internationally wellknown experts from university and industry.

A very important part of the USI program is the nine-month industrial assignment, which is carried out in the second year of the curriculum. The general requirements for this assignment are, amongst others, a conceptually challenging problem, participation in a multidisciplinary team, and a strong design and evaluation orientation.

If you need more information you can find it in USI program website.

U.S. government is giving a great lesson about how not to listen to users, spend billions of dollars and finally regret about that. Creative Good pointed it out in its blog through a video from 60 Minutes. The project regards building a gigantic fence to secure the national border with Mexico against illegal immigrants. The project is so huge that it has started with Bill Clinton, continued with George W. Bush and now it is just in its early phase.

The technology has been developed by Boeing, but so far it is far from what was expected. The interesting thing is that this project is a very good one to show the difference between final users and stakeholders. It is not clear, but Boeing may have talked to the high officers from the American Security Dept, but forgot to talk to the border patrol, those who are there in the border daily trying to detect people crossing the border and consequently people who know what are the needs of that job. It is never too much to remind that who pays the bill (of the project or signs the project) normally is not the same who will use the system.

Currently the implemented part of the project is considered a failed prototype (By the way, the intention was not to have a prototype at this point. But apparently “prototype” is a good word to describe anything which is not well done as expected). People from different departments of the U.S government are trying to find where is the responsibility for this situation. Boeing does not want to talk about it. Hopefully we all learn from this kind of experience.