“Events at the St. Louis Science Center will focus on usability in healthcare. The advances of technology may have ushered in a new era of convenience, but sometimes along with it comes a new era of frustration. From alarm clocks to zippers, things are becoming more sophisticated but also harder to use for the average person.

To address the balance between ‘new and improved’ and ‘easy to operate,’ a relatively new group of professionals aims to show the St. Louis community how life can become a bit easier on Nov. 10 at the Saint Louis Science Center. Making life a little easier is the goal of the local celebration of the third annual World Usability Day, an initiative that is focused on the benefits of usability engineering and user-centered design. Created by the Usability Professionals’ Association, World Usability Day includes special events across the globe — including here in St. Louis.

With healthcare products as this year’s theme, the celebration and demonstrations at the Science Center will focus on how the average person can better deal with the myriad of complications that come with, navigating health insurance claims, nutrition, prescriptions and supplements, and other products and processes associated with healthcare.”

It all happens Saturday, November 10 from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the St. Louis Science Center, 5050 Oakland Ave. St. Louis, MO 63110.

“SWFAddress is a small script that sits on top of SWFObject and provides deep linking for Flash websites and applications. In other words it enables the Back, Forward and Reload buttons of the browser and creates unique URLs with page titles that can be sent over email or IM. SWFAddress uses the ExternalInterface functionality introduced in Flash Player 8 and comes with a technique that enables search engine indexing for deep Flash links.” (Thanks jonnymac!)

“Thanks to CSS selectors it’s possible to attach icons to anything you want just by adding an attribute of your choosing to your HTML. Want a popup icon? try <a href=’#’ icon=’popup’> how about a magnifier? <a href=’#’ icon=’mag’>. You can even add them automatically for file types. Here’s how.”

“We understand what 404 means: Page Not Found. But the average internet user has no idea what 404 means or what to do about it. To them, it’s yet another unintelligible error message from the computer. Most 404 pages are unvarnished geek-speak. Consider the default 404 page under IIS…”

“Increasingly, many UX professionals feel that they have the experience and insight to wield more authority and make a larger impact on the products they help to build. Product management is garnering more interest from interaction designers (IxDs), information architects (IAs), and UX designers looking to increase their influence and ensure user-centered product development. Becoming a product manager is a logical move for many UX practitioners, as it requires many of the same skills, traits, and competencies involved in crafting a user experience.”

A Flickr set of XPLANE founder Dave Gray’s sketches tagged with “stlux” — visual notes from the 2006 St Louis User Experience conference.

“I noticed that I, and fellow webdesigners, keep making the same usability mistakes over and over. This checklist with 88 questions is a must read for every webdesigner who cares about usability.”

“Experience Dynamics has made this diagram available as a poster-size print, perfect for hanging in your office, cube or team-area. This was a fun diagram to work on. Frank Spillers, of Experience Dynamics saw my earlier Flickr diagrams and wanted to commission something similar with some general usability and user experience concepts. The idea was to emphasize the readability and approachability of the subject matter (keep it fun!) and not overload the map with too many concepts.”

“John Maeda is a graphic designer, visual artist, and computer scientist at the MIT Media Lab. He’s been dubbed ‘the Master of Simplicity,’ is the author of a blog on simplicity, and also has a new book called The Laws of Simplicity. The book outlines ten laws of simplicity over 100 pages (a page count restraint Maeda imposed on himself). It’s full of interesting anecdotes and big picture ideas about simplicity.”

“How many times have you had to fight hard for the ability to do field studies and other observations at the very start of the project? How many times have you patiently explained that taking time now would be rewarded by faster time to market overall? And how many times were you successful? The HCI community has long complained about product processes that do not allow time to start with good observations. The more I examine this issue, the more I think that it is we, the HCI community, who are wrong.”

“Some colleagues at Adaptive Path have launched a survey on the business value of user experience, and how organizations treat user experience. It’s brief (about 5 minutes), and if you fill it out, you can get a free copy of our report ‘Leveraging Business Value.’”

“What’s the difference between a huge mass-market Internet success, and a niche tool favored only by a tiny techie minority? I learned part of the answer in a recent project I finished up a few months ago.”

“We’ll be heading back to Washington D.C. with more sessions and more speakers than ever, including special guest presenters Steven Johnson, Michael Bierut, Jeff Veen, Jared Spool, Nate Bolt, Dan Brown along with members of Adaptive Path. We’re developing all new curriculum for this year’s User Experience Week. And we’re presenting sessions in two tracks that will offer practitioner skills development as well as product management strategy and business value methods.”

“Whether you are testing the User Interface for a new technology or just re-branding your service, chances are that you could benefit from some sound market feedback. The good news is that you don’t have to spend weeks on research or thousands of dollars to get it. Cafe testing — quick, low-cost, informal market testing at a cafe — can help you get the feedback you need fast. This article tells you everything you need to know to get started.”

“…let’s say you’re not a Ward Cunningham or any other famous, visible, already influential industry player. You’re an engineer, or maybe a program manager. In that case, you do what many of us did at Sun… subvert from within. Here’s my little unofficial guide to creating passionate users for those working in Big Companies. Most is from things a maverick (but cleverly disguised as compliant) group of us did at Sun, while we could.”