World Usability Day Charter

Today it’s the World Usability Day, this year’s theme is ‘Designing for a Sustainable World’, a theme that’s particular personal to me, not only refering to the usability factor, but also to this year’s topic! As founder of SHiFT – Social and Human Ideas for Tecnology, I personally recommend that all that agree with me that a lot need to be done to improve the way we experience and design technology to please read and sign the World Usability Day Charter:

Human error is a misnomer. Technology today is too hard to use. A cell phone should be as easy-to-use as a doorknob. In order to humanize a world that uses technology as an infrastructure for education, healthcare, government, communication, entertainment, work, and other areas, we must agree to develop technologies in a way that serves people first.

Technology should enhance our lives, not add to our stress or cause danger through poor design or poor quality. It is our duty to ensure that this technology is effective, efficient, satisfying and reliable, and that it is usable by all people. This is particularly important for people with disabilities, because technology can enhance their lives, letting them fully participate in work, social and civic experiences. Human error is a misnomer. Technology should be developed knowing that human beings have certain limitations. Human error will occur if technology is not both easy-to-use and easy-to-understand. We need to reduce human error that results from bad design. We believe a united, coordinated effort is needed to develop reliable, easy-to- use technology to serve people in all aspects of their lives, including education, health, government, privacy, communications, work and entertainment. We must put people at the center of design, beginning with their needs and wants, and resulting in technology that benefits all of us. Therefore, we, the undersigned, agree to work together to design technology that helps human beings truly realize their potential, so that we can create a better world for ourselves and future generations.

We agree to observe World Usability Day each year, to provide a single worldwide day of events around the world that brings together communities of professional, industrial, educational, citizen and governmental groups for our common objective: to ensure that technology helps people live to their full potential and helps create a better world for all citizens everywhere.

Article 1: Education

Wired and wireless schools are appearing everywhere. Students around the world benefit from low-cost, easy-to-use, reliable computing, Internet access, and telecommunication. Educational technology must be not only affordable and available, but must be usable by teachers, students and parents.

Article 2: Health

Healthcare must be available to everyone around the world. Medical technology can improve health, but it must be easy-to-use: error in this arena is costly. Because we are what we eat, we need healthier food supplies that will improve the well being of people everywhere. Technology that produces better food for all must be built on research that keeps the whole person in mind.

Article 3: Government

Governments around the globe seek to use new technology to better serve their citizens and increase participation in the civic experience. Citizens can pay taxes and take care of business online in many countries in the world; this same capability should be available to all, eliminating the digital divide that separates rich from poor or isolates social groups. Voting systems must ensure trust and confidence in elections. Technology that supports civic engagement must give all citizens equal access and opportunity, and must be easy to use and easy to understand by all citizens, including those with disabilities of any kind.

Article 4: Communication
People need to connect with each other. We have more means than ever to communicate: phones, Internet, messaging and the printed medium. Technology that facilitates communication between people must be intuitive to use. It should have instructions that are easy to understand, and knobs, dials and buttons that do not require constant tuning.

Article 5: Privacy and Security
As the use of technology grows, so do concerns about new forms of e-commerce, e-government and e-communication. We must build in appropriate safeguards to ensure that our interaction is secure, that children and others are protected, and that our systems are trustworthy.

Article 6: Entertainment

Entertainment is not just for our spare time. People use entertainment for many reasons throughout their daily lives. The world of entertainment has embraced technology to give us photos, movies, music and games in new ways and on new devices. But, even amusement benefits from usability! Incomprehensible remote controls, confusing instructions and blinking VCR clocks speak to the need for improvement in our media. Usable entertainment systems will make the experience less tiring and frustrating.

Sign the Charter

Open Declaration on European Public Services

Endorse the Open Declaration!

Let’s improve European public services together.

On November 19th, the EU governments will meet in Malmo to sign a Ministerial Declaration that will define the key priorities for e-government strategy in Europe for the next years.

A group of Web 2.0 enthusiasts launched an open collaborative effort to build an Open Declaration on European Public Services, which calls on European governments to embrace the values of transparency, participation and empowerment and so improve public services. The European Commission and the Swedish Presidency of the EU have accepted that we present the declaration in the official program of the Ministerial Conference.

We now need to collect thousands of endorsements in order to convince governments to fully embrace these values.

If you share the values of the Open Declaration, please add your name in this form. Together we can make a difference!

If you agree, you may sign it and then join the Facebook Group to start spreading the word.

Let’s do it Portugal?

http://limparportugal.org/

Failure?

The following video is part of the ‘Dream the Impossible’ Documentary Series by Honda, a series of short documentary films celebrating those who have the courage to turn failure into success and in the process giving live to dreams

Honda is a company founded by a dreamer ‘Soichiro Honda‘ a man known to ask their employees to take risks! A man renown for allowing a hundred times, as long we succeed once.

Risk is an inherent part of living, learning and experiencing and only thru failures we can achieve that. So, sometimes you just need to put yourself to the test, take risks, move away from your basis and see how this affects you in unexpected ways.

In the end, Risk seems to be a cultural problem, varying from culture to culture, where some see risk and failure as positive thing and others seem to find close to reckless behavior.

Oh, Temptation

(via André > via Sofia)

The video reminded me the fun that I had doing kids usability tests back at SAPO.pt and how much I wasn’t ready for having kids on the uxLAB! They were definitely in control, not me!

Finding todays Ada…

Suw Charman, who joined us in Portugal for SHiFT 2006 is one of the mentors behind todays celebration – ‘Finding Ada‘ – which can be summarized in a very simple way: Get to know, at least once a year on this day, a bit more about the amazing women working in technology and their important role for todays achievements

illustration by UnkemptWomen.

As organizer of SHiFT I can safely say that most of the women in technology go unnoticed, for sometime I personally tried to figure out the reasoning behind such fact. One other time also asked for help to other fellow women to find such individuals that shine in the dark, to help me persuade them to take place in the stage and even so, in the end, is almost impossible to have even representations of man and women on stage, although I’m happy to say that we managed to keep scoring better on women representation each year.

So rather than telling you about the amazing story of the first women in technology I set out to search and find some of the women I come to know about who happen to work with technology related subjects! As Portuguese, I’ve decided to talk about a portuguese women, so I chose Elvira Fortunato – a portuguese research who hit the headlines last year when received an award from the European Research Council on behalf of her work on the field of transparent computing and in particular for developing the first paper transitor. Elvira work has been centered on building transistors out of alternative materials like ceramics and glass.

Elvira Fortunato work is not only unique and interesting in turning apparently inert surfaces into computational interfaces, but also presents bright possibilities for low-cost, flexible, and disposable microelectronics, such as biosensors, intelligent packaging, and light-bulbs on orders of magnitude cheaper than the traditional transistors.

For anyone interested in reading more about Elvira and her team work, please refer to the Applied Physics Letters (2008) available online http://link.aip.org/link/?APPLAB/93/203501/1, or the paper on “High Performance Flexible Hybrid Field Effect Transistors based on Cellulose Fiber-Paper” will be published September in IEEE Electron Device Letters – http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=55.

For those of you, who can speak Portuguese, you may also find very interesting to view this interviews where Elvira, explains briefly the idea behind this transparent electronic development:

This post is a very brief note on a project I find truly original and amazing. Her work recent recognition only serves to prove that a lot of interesting and unique technological developments is being done and lead by women, so to her, her team, and all of the more than geek women out there, my special congratulations on this day and a big THANK YOU for their work!

I can’t finish this post, with two special notes, one SHiFT and our desire to have more women presenting their findings and work, not only as form of knowledge sharing but also reaching for the community and helping inspire others to follow their same technology steps.

illustration by UnkemptWomen.

The last note, is more of a thank you note to Lucy for her illustrations for this post, something that was entirely last minute, but couldn’t be in sync with the idea behind this day.

Learn to Appreciate Technology!

Amazingly true, unfortunately, we go and complain when we should probably be wondering the marvelous things that we get for granted this days!

Helping others thru KIVA

Almost at the same time I’ve decided coming over to Germany, I’ve decided to invest some money on helping others, I already did know KIVA but never really took the time to browse thru their pages and see the impact of their work. That same day I decided to invested a little bit of money on two projects, one in Gana and one in Togo, both from women trying to set up/leveraging their jobs. I was SOLD! The whole idea of helping others with what to me is (almost) nothing and which has the possibility of changing lives, is simply the reason I need to do it! You simply can’t explain the reasoning but even from the pure economical point of view (especially considering the last banking/economic events) seems much more wise, than having money laying around in banks!

So what is KIVA?

KIVA simply lets people like me and You loan money to poor working people in less unfortunate countries as they put it more or less in their mission statement:

Kiva’s mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.

How do they do it? They simply set a person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. Real people with real needs. Every of them with a special need in terms of money and a pre-defined repayment schedule. Once they repaid you, you’re free to re-lend it again… and again… and again, all in a super transparent way of operating, for instance in my case Paypal did all the financial transactions for me for free (aka not charging any commissions for KIVA), so it’s almost like asking what is stopping us to do something?

Join me @ KIVA, and start helping others, and if my word isn’t enough to get you motivated, watch the video by Kieran Ball about his experience with KIVA:

I’ll probably set up a Lending Group or two, so keep in touch if you’re interested in taking this to next level!