The Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) co-sponsored Puget Sound World Usability Day 2013 at the University of Washington on November 14th in the HUB Lyceum on the UW Seattle campus.

World Usability Day is a free event, open to anyone wishing to attend. Seasoned researchers, designers, and user experience professionals got a chance to share their thoughts and experiences on what it is like to be a user research professional and sometimes experience push back from the company about the value of user research and design. According to Darrel Rhea of Rhea Insight, many times a designer is “not invited” and must “sell design’s contribution” to the team.

Speakers at this event were quite inspiring to students hopeful to enter the user research and user experience design profession. They had many important insights regarding when to conduct user research, successful workflows and methodologies involved, and how to sell your company on the importance of user research-based design.

Speakers came from a variety of companies and the University of Washington:

• Cindy Alvarez, Yammer!
• Ana Pinto da Silva, Microsoft
• Darrel Rhea, Rhea Insight
• Daniella Kim, Halibut Flats Research / Art Institute of Seattle
• Lara Arguelles, Microsoft
• Julie Kientz, University of Washington, HCDE
• Andrew Berry, University of Washington, HCDE
• Kevin Flick, SonoSite
• Stephen Giff, Microsoft
• Ona Anicello, JP Morgan Chase
• Robert Graf / Tara Tarjoto, Microsoft / Microsoft
• Hugh McLoone, T-Mobile
• Paul Elrif / Chris Chapman, Caelus / Google
• Huatong Song, University of Washington, Tacoma
• Serguei Endrikhovski, Microsoft
• Connie Missimer, AT&T
• Paula Croxon, Avanade
• Sean Munson, University of Washington, HCDE
• Jan Spyridakis / Mark Zachry University of Washington, HCDE

The day was made possible due to the generosity of a wide array of sponsors:

• Anthro-Tech
• User Research International
• Convey UX
• Caelus, LLC
• Chase
• Yammer
• HCDE
• Microsoft