Keeping people engaged while using your technology products and services is a challenge for businesses and organizations.
What kind of design thinking needs to be incorporated to keep people engaged?
World Usability Day Detroit returns for its second year Thursday, November 13 with a special evening event.
For this year’s event, our Detroit User Experience group is partnering with Ladies That UX Detroit to host Dave Lingholm and Cora Cowles to speak on this year’s theme: engagement.
The two talks will explore how emerging technologies can enhance engagement within our families and our communities.
Stop Broadcasting! What Detroit is Doing to Pay Attention Online
On the Internet, most governments are pushing out the information they want their constituents to know, instead of paying attention to what their constituents want to know about their city.
Dave’s talk focuses on how the city of Detroit plans to better serve their constituents online by focusing on the information they want, how they want it, and when they want it.
As Director of Digital Media and Community Engagement for the City of Detroit, Dave Lingholm is a new employee in a new role within city government. He’s been tasked with ensuring the city is responsive to citizens online.
Prior to joining the city, Dave guided two Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan blogs through significant reinventions and doubled traffic year over year.
He also resurrected projects like Dig Downtown Detroit and helped the Detroit Regional News Hub grow into a trusted source for news about the city for journalists around the world.
Engaging Children Getting Them Excited About Potty Training
How can you get children actively involved in their potty training success? In the design of the Pull-Ups mobile potty training application, the team made deliberate decisions about when and how to involve the child, encouraging them to anticipate and ultimately look forward to their upcoming potty breaks.
Cora Cowles is Senior User Experience Architect at Organic, whose interests include user research and information architecture. Her clients have included Kimberly-Clark, Pulte, Ford, General Motors and Quicken Loans.
Merging the needs of the user with the needs of the business is not always easy, but Cora finds it is one of the most rewarding parts of her job.
Registration
Cost for World Usability Day Detroit is $5.00, which covers food and refreshments. Pre-registration is required so we know how much food to order; RSVP by Wednesday, November 12 at noon EST.
What Is World Usability Day?
If you’re not familiar with World Usability Day (WUD), it’s a worldwide event held annually on the second Thursday in November. It’s inclusive, bringing people together from the community to learn about and discuss how usability affects our daily lives in the services and products we use.
Events are held locally and are open to the public.
This year marks the tenth anniversary of World Usability Day. I’ve attended events every year, except one. They’re always inspiring, where I learn what people have done and continue to do to make our world work better.
One of my favorite memories is an alarm clock usability test our Michigan Usability Professionals’ Association conducted at the Michigan State University WUD event five or six years ago.
As of today, over 85 WUD events will be happening in 34 countries around the world. Check out this year’s events and learn about World Usability Day on their website.
I hope to see you November 13!
