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.

Read more at: http://www.worldusabilityday.org/

The Official Gmail Blog shows the evolution of Gmail Chat. In it, they describe having a usability lab to test out new features and ideas. The feedback from the testers are used to help guide their decisions. TechCrunch gave a peak inside Gmail’s Usability Lab. As can be seen, it is not some big lab with a two way mirror. Their lab is just a small room with a computer and some video equipment which any company on a budget can setup. I think what is most interested is that despite all the different iterations of Gmail chat seen from the links, Google eventually ended up with a very simplistic lightweight application. Sometimes, less is more.

Samsung recently filed a patent for visual gestures with a cell phone. Unlike the iPhone where the gestures take place on the touch screen, the patent uses the phone’s built in camera to recognize preset motions. While it’s a clever idea, imagine seeing someone “speaking” sign language to their phone. Interacting with the phone this way may seem strange in public and it remains to be seen how users will react to this feature if it ever makes it onto an actual phone.

According to Tom Sterwatm the Chair of the sub-committee of the International Standards Organisation (ISO), the new version of ISO 13407, the International Standard for Human Centered Design (which will be called ISO 9241-210 to bring it into line with other usability standards), will use the term “user experience.”

The term user experience is now widely used, especially by major players in the industry including Apple, IBM and Microsoft. However, in many cases, the term is contrasted to usability which is often depicted as a much narrower concept focusing on systems being easy to use.

Other exponents explain that user experience goes beyond usability by including such issues as usefulness, desirability, credibility and accessibility.