Geneva | 10 Nov 2011
Telono is happy to invite you to World Usability Day 2011!
World Usability Day 
was founded by the Usability Professionals' Association to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use.
was founded by the Usability Professionals' Association to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use.[REGISTER]
This year's event will take place on Thursday 10 November at 5pm at Swissôtel Métropole (Quai Général Guisan 34, 1204 Geneva) and will have two parts:- Four 30min presentations on usability and user experience
- Drinks and networking
1. Presentations
4:30 | Welcome
5-5:30pm | "I would love to send SMS to my doughter but I cannot write..." - How illiterate people use mobile phones?
Elsa Friscira, Student, EPFL
According to the latest data (2009), some 793 million adults - two third of them women - still lack basic reading and writing skills. Mostly based in developing countries, they are excluded from the numerous benefits of reading-based technologies such as text messaging, which is a cheap, fast and convenient asynchronous way to communicate as well as facing problems in harnessing mobile phones with text-driven interfaces in general.
This talk will detail findings from a requirements capture and usability tests that were conducted with illiterate people in Lausanne and in a small village in India. The following topics will receive special attention: how illiterates currently mitigate general usability and accessibility problems on mobile phones, how this mirrors their coping strategies in the physical world and how we can enable them to benefit from text messaging.
Presenter's short bio, a few lines long.
5.45-6:15pm | User-Centered Design in Video Games: Investigating Gestural Interfaces Appropriation
Nicolas Nova, consultant at Near Future Laboratory
The presentation will focus on the exploration of videogame usage in the context of a user-centered design project. In order to designcompelling user experiences with gestural interfaces, we undertook asmall-scale qualitative study. This exploration addressed players’experience and perception of realism when usinggestural interfaces. We compared the user experience of these two styles ofinteraction depending on the level of expertise and the physical skills of theplayers. The presentation will show how such results have been turned intotangible insights and guidelines used to the design innovative game prototypes.Nicolas Nova is a consultant at Near Future Laboratory. He undertakes field studies to inform and evaluate the creation of innovative products and services in the domains of video games, mobile and location-based media as well as networked objects/robots.
6.30-7pm | OpenSense: toward user centric design of mobile air quality services
Riikka Hänninen, EPFL & Nokia Research Center
Six families from a European capital were studied asto the effects of air quality on their everyday lives. The study had two stages, with the first one assessing perceptions toward air quality, and the second one eliciting an ideation concerning mobile air quality services. Airquality variation played a role in the lives of the families, with particularly the commute context as well as the central areas of the city being perceived as polluted. Indoor air quality was also a problem for families with poor filtering systems. It was relatively easy for the participating families to design air quality services addressing the challenges identified in their ownlives. The presentation will describe the design process used in the presen tstudy, highlighting the key conceptual areas coming out from the research.Riikka Hänninen’s (MA) background is in industrial design and usability. She is a researcher in a Nokia / EPFL collaboration project titled OpenSense, which focuses on use of wireless sensor networks to monitor air quality variation. Riikka’s role in the project is to apply user centric methods in order to ensure acceptability of the service concepts.