Ever have that feeling that you want to throw your computers, your microwaves, your expensive gadgets out into a field and do it Office Space style? Or trying to set the clock on a VCR, but it’s unclear what buttons you should press? Or how for some reason a phone number you entered in your phone disappears even though you thought you added it yesterday? It’s that frustration that culminates after hours of struggling with an interface that seems like it should do what you want, but just will not.
Fortunately, there are people out there that will help improve poor interfaces like that–user experience professionals who work every day to find out those problems and improve interfaces based on feedback.
And today is the one day in the entire year that celebrates Usability. The World Usability Day was created to bring awareness into user experience–a field that has been garnering attention. Like the site states, every user has the right to ask for things to work better.
The day organizes events from all over the world with events happening every hour. From sessions on usability in assistive technologies (how to design interfaces that even people who are color blind can read, for instance) to a usability game show where usability professionals will compete to critique unusable products and quickly redesign.
Spongecell too aims for a better user experience. I am constantly working to think about how the interface would work for the user–from interviews to usability testing in our offices. And of course, if you have any feedback about the usability, let us know! There might even be a possibility of participating in a future user study.
It’s not just about making products simple and easy so that your parents or even your wonderful grandmother can use. It’s also about understanding the target users–their context and their work. Yet it goes back to empathy–understanding someone’s frustration. Only then can user experience succeed. After all, I had written a few years ago about why I worked in user experience, “Yet, my mother, an ambitious go-getter, has difficulty touching an object that offers honks for errors and complex dialog for confusion.”
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