Thursday 11 November is World Usability Day, a day that brings together community and industry for a common goal – to ensure that essential services and products are easier to access and simpler to use.

The day has been marked annually since 2005, celebrating the progress and success made in creating accessible and usable products and services, but also recognising the work that lies ahead in making sure the digital world is as user friendly as possible.

The theme for this year’s World Usability Day is ‘Design of our online world: Trust, Ethics and Integrity’. With the past 18 months changing how technology is used due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the theme asks three key questions:

  • How do we create trust in the online environment?
  • What are the ethical implications of our designs?
  • How do we design for accessibility, to ensure that everyone can use our designs?

More than 40 events are being held across the world, with almost every single event having remote participation. More information about the events can be found on the World Usability Day website.

How Intopia is celebrating World Usability Day

In our nearly 6 years as a company, accessibility and usability has been at the forefront of everything we do. Our mission is to help make the digital world more inclusive, and as a part of our work, we support our customers in making sure that what they design and create is as user-friendly as possible.

Intopia Connect is a service that connects clients directly with people with a disability. By taking part in user feedback sessions, they provide direct feedback on whether services and products are accessible and are incentivised for their time. It creates the opportunity for people with disabilities to have their voices heard by people who create the platforms and technologies that they rely upon.

As a part of this year’s World Usability Day, Intopia has put together two videos that feature some of our Intopia Connect customers and participants.

Our participant video features Ashleigh, Eugene and Sean. They have a wide range of lived experience, and use different assistive technologies to support their navigation of the digital world every day. For each of them, usability is absolutely essential, and they highlighted that they’re more likely to trust companies who listen to their users.

Our customer video features Nissa Blagojevic from Canva, and Amir Ansari from Iress. Both are accessibility champions within their own organisations, and both companies recognise the importance of user feedback, as well as the range of users who use their products and services. By gaining important feedback, their products will continue to make improvements in both usability and accessibility.

To find out more about Intopia Connect, you can visit the Intopia Connect website.

If you’re a person with a disability that’s interested in taking part, you can register to become an Intopia Connect participant.