World Usability Day announces 2007 healthcare focus

The Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) has announced World Usability Day 2007 will take place on November 8, 2007. This year’s focus will be on healthcare.

World Usability Day was founded in 2005 with a mission to increase the public’s awareness of the need to make the services and products important to human life easier to access and simpler to use.Global issues such as healthcare, education and government are addressed through expert forums, exhibits, events and initiatives in numerous locations throughout the world.

A kick-off for 2007 will take place at the UPA International Conference in Austin Texas on June 13th with a program entitled “Healthcare Usability in the Trenches.” The program will feature Jason Rossback, Zoll Data Systems, Theo Mandel, Ph.D, Interface Design and Development, LLC and Janine Purcell from the Veterans Health Administration.

“The importance of user-centered design in healthcare is truly about life and death” noted Elizabeth Rosenzweig, Founder and Director of World Usability Day. “Whether it’s new medical devices or technologies; drug research, approval or delivery; patient forms or medical record sharing; emergency disaster planning or increasing the functionality of hospitals and everyday healthcare delivery, everyone is effected in some way by the intersection of usability and healthcare. There are many commonalities, yet each region of the world faces its own set of unique challenges. We believe that focusing World Usability Day 2007 on healthcare will create a stronger awareness of these issues and lead to initiatives that have long term impact on the quality of everyone’s life.”

World Usability Day 2006 was a tremendous success. UPA, along with its allied organizations coordinated 225 events in 175 cities in 35 countries that attracted over 40,000 attendees and volunteers at worldwide site locations, as well as through webcasts online at the World Usability Day website, www.worldusabilityday.org.

The goals for 2007 include growing the number, size and types of the events worldwide. This includes: adding more events that not only provide education about usability, but work to effect change by taking the message to the average citizen, offering additional webcasting features that enable World Usability Day to be even more accessible and increasing the volunteers, supporters and sponsors for the event. In order to accomplish this, we need more event leaders and volunteers as part of the World Usability Day team.

Sponsors to date for World Usability 2007 include: Apogee, Axure Software Solutions, Constant Contact, Dell, Different, FatDUX, Google, Intuit, Microsoft User Research, Mitsui-Links, Ovo Studios, SirValuse, VKI Studios and Usability.ch.

Any organization or individual with a general interest in user-centered design, healthcare or related areas, is invited to participate in this event. Details for volunteering, submitting a local event, sponsorship or general information is available at www.worldusabilityday.org or by contacting Caryn Saitz, Executive Director at caryn at worldusabilityday dot org or 617.905.5691.