What is World Usability Day?
It's about making our world work better.

It's about "Making Life Easy" and user friendly. Technology today is too hard to use. A cell phone should be as easy to access as a doorknob. In order to humanize a world that uses technology as an infrastructure for education, healthcare, transportation, government, communication, entertainment, work and other areas, we must develop these technologies in a way that serves people first...

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 200 events are organized in over 43 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.

World Usability Day 2009 is approaching design from Cradle to Cradle. Coming from a user-centric perspective and looking beyond form and function, we are exploring the impact design has on our World. The ‘Cradle to Cradle' approach is to start the design with the premise of using materials that can fully enter a new life cycle by either going back to nature or going back into the design process as a new product. This holistic approach to sustainable design shows how usability can apply to all of what we do and build.

The 2009 theme "Designing for a Sustainable World" focuses on how our products and services impact our world. We look at all products and services, whether they are buildings, roads, consumer products, business, services or healthcare systems; throughout their life cycle. The impact focuses on - our environment, energy, water, soil, and more. Have the materials and processes that have been used been recycled and are they re-usable? Are they user and environmentally friendly? These are questions we all must consider as we design, purchase, use and dispose of products each and every day.

Human-centered design directly supports the first two pillars of sustainability:

- Economic - matching a design to user's needs and abilities enhance its utilization, quality, and efficiency, thus providing cost effective solutions and reducing the likelihood that systems products and services will be rejected by their users;

- Social - taking a human-centered approach results in systems, products and services which are better for the health and wellbeing of their users, including users with disabilities;

Human-centered design also supports the environmental component through promoting a whole lifecycle approach to design. It explicitly encourages all those involved in design to consider the longer-term implications of their system for their users and therefore for the environment.