What a wonderful WUD!

Two weeks have elapsed and I think the whole team has just about recovered from another, wonderful World Usability Day (WUD) event.

This is the thirteenth year the User Vision team have held this event … and thanks to an amazing team, it was even bigger and better this year. We had a fantastic theme – inclusion through user experience – a topic within our core values since we formed nearly two decades ago.

For those who weren’t able to come and experience it for yourselves, together with 100+ of our clients, here are the highlights:

• Visitors had great fun controlling the PC with their eyes, using our eye tracker, and gaining a better appreciation of users with disabilities who are reliant on this type of technology
• Our accessibility lab was very popular, hosting 3 activities for people to get involved in:
• an overview of how to design for inclusivity and how we design for these different needs
• an introduction to WCAG 2.0 – our visitors had to match the guidelines to a non-technical summary of what they actually mean
• hands-on use of different screen readers
• Exploring how to generate empathy in the inclusive design processwhere we asked our guests to try out two novel approaches to help them gain a more direct understanding of how the world appears to people with visual impairments:
• looking through a range of physical glasses modified to mimic a range of visual impairments
• using an augmented reality app that achieves the same aim using a smartphone and Google cardboard
• Trialling a new Alexa demo skill and considering aspects including tone of voice, personalisation and considerations for vulnerable customer groups
• Designing a fake news detector to help members of the (unsuspecting) public to better identify unreliable news sources
• Hosting our extremely well-attended panel on inclusion with industry experts Kevin White (Scottish Government), Gavin Neate (Neatebox), Sarah Tait (Sainsbury’s Bank, and Ed Chandler (User Vision).

Thank you to everyone who was able to share in this important day, helping us all to think differently about the needs of everyone as we consider and design new products, services and experiences.

We hope to see many more of you next year!