World Usability Day - November 3

World Usability Day is set for November 3. It will be a series of local events around the world to raise awareness of the importance of easy-to-use technology and user-centered design for all.

In a few weeks, we will debut the Drupal-based, Bryght-hosted community site for World Usability Day. At this point the site is very much under construction: we are getting ready to have the local leaders start doing their part to build it.

I want to raise awareness of World Usability Day to the Drupal community for several reasons.

1. You may want to participate in a local event near you. Hang out with "usability people" for the day - they do not bite. (^: We have over 30 locations planning something at this point.

2. You may want to help organize something. Is there a local usabillity lab that would be willing to host a formal usability test of a Drupal-power site? (Imagine 20 such tests all happening the same day - we would learn quite a bit). Or a panel discussion on the usability of open source software? Or a case study of Drupal used for e-government? Each location can really do whatever they want to recognize World Usability Day - some could even get as "radical" as burning hard-to-use manuals or holding hands in a park. Is there something Drupal-related that you would like to organize?

3. I could use some help with the technical end of the Drupal site. I have been using Drupal off-and-on for 2 years but this will be my most ambitious project yet with it. I am learning about the guts of many of its features for the first time. I am not a module developer, but can hack code as needed. Having someone who knows that they are doing to help me out would be appreciated. Bryght support has been great so far - more technical help welcome.

4. We will have an interesting new user base - people who spend their time designing user interfaces. I expect to get a lot of feedback as they use the community World Usability Day site. "Why does our site do this or that? Wouldn't this other interaction technique work better?". I have started tweaking things (like the theme and menu), but there is much more to do. I will try to get this feedback trickled down to everyone here. Hopefully some of these usabillity professionals will get excited about Drupal and become active members of the community.

More details on World Usability Day coming later - but I wanted to give you all a heads up now.