Thanks to everybody who came last night to our World Usability Day event. We had a lot of fun and hope you did too.

Some discussions were held around what trends we will be seeing in the coming year. Most of these seem to be technology driven, and many will present interesting usability challenges as designers face the task of building new experience types around these new possibilities.

Some of the key topics discussed focused around:

• Mobile web – How to face the challenge of disparate handset specs, smaller screen and distracted users? When is a pared down mobile version of the site the better choice, or can new high resolution handset allow users to easily use standard sites?
• Location awareness – This is a feature we expect to see a lot more of in the next twelve months, and how designers approach its implementation will be very interesting

There seemed to be a few points of disagreement amongst the audience, so as promised we’ve opened up this page to continue the discussion. Feel free to put your usability predictions in the comments area below. What trends in research and design do you think we will see emerging over the coming months?

Thursday November 12th is the fifth annual World Usability Day. The day’s focus is “to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use”. It is a day for usability practitioners to discuss and promote the work we do in making it simpler for users and customers to achieve their goals.

Each year, World Usability Day focuses on a specific topic. In 2009, the theme for the day is Designing for a Sustainable World. This can include design processes that improve the environmental, social, economical and technological aspects of the design and product lifecycle.

To help celebrate World Usability Day, UsabilityOne will be throwing a free BBQ on the Thursday afternoon. We are welcoming anybody with an interest in usability and sustainability to come down to our offices and enjoy a drink with others in the industry.

The event will be at:

Map

Things kick off at 4:00 PM, with a short presentation at 5:30.

Feel free to drop in at any time during the afternoon, but please email us to if you plan on attending as spaces (and sausages) are limited.

It’s also not too late to enter our Simple Change Big Impact competition. We will be giving away a copy of either Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think or Avinash Kaushik’s Web Analytics: An Hour a Day to the best entry. So head over and tell us the simplest change you made that had the biggest impact. The winner will be announced at the BBQ

See you there