World Usability Day 2009

How can software and web sites, nowadays more or less part of everyday life, be made easier to use and thus more user-friendly? This is the question which well-known experts, researchers and practitioners ask themselves every year during the "World Usability Day" held around the globe. They meet up with students, developers and product managers to exchange ideas in presentations and workshops and to discuss how improved user-friendliness can raise the quality, and also the market shares, of interactive products.
An interesting, informative programme of lectures was held on Usability Day for the Rhine-Ruhr region on 12th November 2009, now for the third time in a row at the Faculty of Media at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. Around one hundred participants met up in the university extension building at the invitation of Prof. Dr. Markus Dahm to find out how interactive applications can be made still easier to use and therefore more accessible.

The topic was illuminated from a number of differentiated angles in seven presentations. The range of subjects dealt with extended from studies into buying and selling real estate on the Internet, the way children move about the web, cultural differences in the use of multitouch products through to thoughts on usability as a competitive advantage, something that is occasionally underestimated.

The introductory lecture by Patrick Lauke, "Web Evangelist" at the browser development firm Opera, provided a special highlight right at the start, giving insights into the possible web browser of the future. He particularly talked about the goal of creating the same user experience for all IT systems, thus the data content is seen in an identical way, through greater user-friendliness. This experience differs greatly, if only due to different sizes of screens - from iPhones through to large-scale monitors - and to versions of web pages which are not always print-friendly. That is why Mr Lauke argued that web developers and designers should not primarily focus on designing the layout of a web site, but should rather first define the content and then ensure that the information still always retains the same intrinsic value and aesthetics, despite different screen sizes. He furthermore lectured on the usability of browsers on mobile phones and for users with physical handicaps.