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How to make things so that all gadgets we use daily would be simple to understand and usable without a complicated manual or training videos? If a machine is not comfortable to use, people will just not buy it, claims David Lamas, a professor of Interaction Design at Tallinn University. David Lamas is also one of the organisers of World Usability Day or WUD. Karl Hallik asked him about what exactly is user experience and WUD Estonia. Let’s start from the beginning: what is interaction design? Well, we have a whole master’s programme to explain that. The name of the field is Human Computer Interaction. It is very multidisciplinary and a mess as a knowledge area. We have people with computing, sociology, anthropology and design backgrounds. It is multi-faceted, but that’s what we need when you connect technology and people. Within this HCI area, we have been focusing on interaction design, which is creating or developing the systems to make our lives easier and better. That’s what interaction design is all about – it’s about designing technologies to enhance our lives. How is it connected to World Usability Day? Everyone knows that if a machine is not easy to use, no-one will buy it. Now the emphasis is more on user experience, you should be able to use it and actually get some pleasure or some nice feeling out of it. In layman’s terms, if you need trainings or a user manual for it, it is not usable. In the beginning, the main need was to make things usable. If you weren’t able to use a computer, you would go to a training, otherwise you would be seen dumb. Most people in our field they felt this is not the case, we actually need to be responsible and make things that people can use and that’s why WUD was born – to remind the designers and developers that we need to things that people can actually use. Now, as we are almost past this problem, the emphasis has been moving toward user experience, even service design, because we see these technologies integrated into many services that go beyond technology. This event is now more and more related with user experience and service design, although it’s still called World Usability Day. This is a world event, so it happens globally at the same time, plus or minus one day. Every year, there is a unified topic – last year it was education technology and this year it is innovation. We have invited Jettie Hoonhout, a senior scientist at Philips Research, who manages the creation of products and services that enhance well-being and health. Our second keynote speaker is Vitaly Friedman, the editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine, who will talk about responsive design – in the future, all web pages and services should be accessible on all devices. What is WUD Estonia like when compared to the rest of the world? WUD Estonia is one of the biggest ones in Europe, mainly for two reasons: first, other countries have many IT and HCI events. Finland has the Slush this very week. So they have other events in this field. Secondly, Estonia is a very unique environment in Europe – the people, industry, public sector and the state all have a high interest in IT. This is why WUD Estonia is nearly ten times bigger than WUD Finland. We also have visitors from Latvia, Lithuania, Russia and Finland. Visitors from St. Petersburg were so interested, we helped them organise the first local WUD last week. We also host bimonthly so-called mini-WUDs with EstCHI, which are free-form gatherings at the Garage48 HUB in Tallinn. This is a meeting place for academics, who do most of the research in interaction design and people from the industry, who tackle the same problems in their workplace. The aim of these meetings is to connect these two worlds and help innovative solutions prosper. This spring we also widened our grasp and started organising the Global Accessibility Awareness Day. This conference focuses on the differences between accessibility on paper and reality. For example, many new buildings have disabled access ramps, but they tend to be too narrow or steep. Raising awareness is indeed the main goal of these events – to let the society know there are both problems and solutions in these fields. Who visits WUD and mini-WUDs? As the field itself, the conferences welcome people from various fields. We have both designers and IT-people, as well as procurement officials from the public sectors and CEOs. The latter attend to learn about the field to become smarter clients, which is a very welcome trend. So at the same time, there are innovative employees and people who have the capability of hiring these employees on the spot. What will be the topic of WUD 2020? The topic for WUD is always a global decision reached by voting. At the same time it follows world trends. So I think in 2020 WUD could focus on well-being or happiness. Or maybe peace. In fact, much research in the HCI field is done regarding peace. So I hope that in 2020, if not sooner, WUD will focus on peace, happiness and well-being. Questions by Karl Hallik.