"One of the greatest things about the scholarship is the opportunity to meet other women and form a network -- I have kept in touch a lot of the other women that received the scholarship the same year and over the last 2 years this has been invaluable to me. These are women I can rely on and even though we don't see each other frequently, the bond we formed is strong."
-- Gaby Aguilera, Software Engineer-Testing, and 2004 Anita Borg Scholar
World Usability Day is an annual event that highlights the fact that millions of people around the world encounter technology problems every day, and so promotes the work that user experience professionals do to make technology easier to use. The day starts at midday NZST in New Zealand and ends 32 hours later at 11PM PST in California, with events on every continent (except maybe Antarctica!).
Events focus on a wide range of technologies and users: Not only do we work on travel websites, search engines, and email programs, but we also study how to best support people with special needs (from jet pilots to people with visual impairments) and improve the usability of everything from ATMs to operating rooms.
Google has a sizable team of user experience professionals who are constantly working to improve the usability of our products. We test them in lots of ways, like doing statistical analyses of which of two versions of a webpage gets more clicks and usage. Another one of our favorite techniques is inviting people to come into our labs to give us feedback in person. Sometimes, we ask them to sit in front of an eye tracker so we can follow where they are looking on the screen. We continually take the results of all these study types and make changes in the way our software behaves. For instance, we recently made changes to Google Base and Google Groups specifically to make those products easier to use. But while we pride ourselves on the usability of our products, we know that there's always more to be done. Whenever you have a question or complaint about the usability of one of Google's products, we want to hear about it! Use the "contact us" feedback link within a product's help center, and send us the details.
If you're a user experience professional or student interested in working here, please check out our jobs page and get in touch. And lastly, here are some World Usability Day events which caught our eye:
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