World Usability Day was founded in 2005 as an initiative of the Usability Professionals’ Association 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 225 events are organized in over 40 countries around the world to raise awareness for the general public, and train professionals in the tools and issues central to good usability research, development and practice.
One of the original inventors of T9 predictive text input for mobile phones, Cliff Kushler, has developed a new method for anything with a touchscreen by creating a swipe method where the user passes over each letter in the word and does not have to lift his fingers off the keyboard. The new method is aptly named Swype. I could see this being faster than T9, especially for larger touch screens but those with fat fingers and small touch screens will still have problems.
Where would you be in four years if your life was fast forwarded? Two months ago I was asked to do the information architecture for a mini site for the One Tree Hill Season 5 DVD release.
The basic concept was to allow a user to answer a series of questions that would help determine their career in 4 years. The user would then be able to upload their photo onto the body of their given profession and use it as a widget to place on their social networking profile.
When creating the wireframes, I wanted to make it easy to use, always providing a logical next step, while at the same time, promoting the DVD. I think it came out pretty well.
Aurora is a concept video exploring one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept series. For more, visit adaptivepath.com/aurora
