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Social Event Management: World Usability Day

Top Line Result: Major worldwide event series becomes easy to organize with interactive Drupal event management platform.

 

Situational Analysis 

World Usability Day was founded in 2005 by usability expert Elizabeth Rosenzweig to increase awareness of the need for everyday products and services to be more functional, easier to use, and more responsive to the needs of end-users. Taking place the second Tuesday of November, the event is an initiative of the Usability Professionals Association, whose goal is “to ensure that services and products important to human life are easier to access and simpler to use.” The idea is that technology should “serve users first.” 2011’s World Usability Day marks the 7th anniversary of the event, and in those years, WUD has taken hold, with over 153 events in 44 countries attended by over 40,000 people. With this many disparate events worldwide, the organization needed a simple, unified platform for organizers, attendees, and sponsors. WUD needed a website that supported this expanding program:

  • Serve as a platform to create and publicize new events, making it easy for individuals and organizations seeking to create a WUD event to register and manage
  • Be a clearinghouse of information on existing events for attendees looking to register
  • Reach out to sponsors and convey the value of sponsorship, while also making it easy to become a sponsor
  • Given the importance of social media to real-time events, be socially enabled with full Twitter and Facebook integration
  • Allow users to interactively sign the WUD charter, and contribute to the charter as a living document

And, of course, the site itself had to be highly usable! 

Strategy & Solution 

OHO Interactive built a site that incorporates multiple modules and creative application of the blogging capabilities of Drupal to create a social-media integrated, user-friendly site. The World Usability Day site  achieves maximum functionality for a multi-site, multi-organizer event catering to a digitally-savvy audience:

  • A rotating slider on the homepage alternates official event information, a Twitter of the latest tweets about the event, and sponsor logos.
  • A clean homepage layout provides simple buttons to register an event, view events in your home city, or donate to WUD.
  • Integration of the donation page with the popular ticketing and donation platform Eventbrite allows the use of an industry-standard payment technology and provides extra value to sponsors by highlighting sponsor social media links.
  • A creative application of Drupal’s blog features allows users to sign the WUD charter online, and prompts them to contribute their own statements, growing the relevance and depth of the charter.
  • An interactive map allows users to view and register for events easily by region.

World Usability Day continues to grow, as more organizations support the development of products built to respond to users’ needs. The site is built to be expandable as the event grows in support and scope.