We held our World Usability Day event here in Tucson during hours 27-29 of the world-wide event. It was great! It was at the IBM facility, and we ran concurrent activities for the afternoon. They included:

• creating personas
• paper prototyping activity of stove-top design
• out-of-box design activity (including writing wordless instructions) using Legos
• screen reader demonstration
• usability testing of cell phones
• demos of Morae, an automated usability testing package
• demos of some cool IBM storage devices by the design engineer

We had a few local usability folks, some interested IBMers, several technical writers (thanks, STC-SAZ!) and a class of high-school students. We had give-aways for everyone, snacks, and just all around a great time. There was even a photographer there from Inside Tucson Business, a local business weekly newspaper. If they run a story, I’ll link to it from here!

I haven’t heard the final numbers yet, but just the first 37 reporting events around the world had a total of over 4,000 attendees.

I’m already looking forward to next year!