November 12, 2009 marks World Usability Day, an international event with a mission “to increase the public’s awareness of the need to make services and products important to human life easier to access and simpler to use.” This day is special to LEVEL because of our focus on user-centric design, an approach that puts the goals and needs of users in the forefront of everything we create. This year’s World Usability Day theme is “Designing for a Sustainable World.” The theme challenges us to think about design that is both usable and sustainable.

Making sure a user’s experience with a website, application or other product is truly usable involves three tenets:

• It must be easy to use
• It must be useful
• It must be desirable

One could argue that the fourth tenet is “It must be sustainable.”  Thinking about sustainability forces us to look at what we do in a larger context and over a longer period of time. How will something we create be used not only now, but in the future as its users change and the world changes? How long is it meant to last before it will be discarded?  What impact could it have that may not be immediately apparent? LEVEL is recognizing this day externally with a sponsorship and internally with an awareness campaign that encourages us to think about these questions.

Right now is an exciting time the LEVEL User Experience team. We are currently building processes, standards, and tools that not only allow us to design products and services with the highest level of usability, but also enable us to provide our clients with user experience design and consulting that is both innovative and data-driven.

Incorporating research with users into the design process is the best way to achieve optimum usability. Here at LEVEL, we have the technology and expertise to provide a unique service offering:  eye tracking. This is an advanced usability testing technique that uses a special camera to record an individual’s eye movements. The recorded scanpath demonstrates how people interact with a web site or other product. We leverage the recorded information to identify strengths and weaknesses of a specific media or interface and then offer recommendations to create an optimized user experience.

Some of the other usability research and evaluation methods we use are:

• Focus Groups
• Heuristic Evaluations
• Surveys
• User Profiles and Personas
• Usability Testing: in lab, in the field, and remote

We are looking for experienced Information Architects to join our team in our San Jose and San Luis Obispo offices. Interested candidates should go to the Careers section of our site to learn more and apply.