"Designing a Sustainable Future with Ethical AI"November 12th, 2026
World Usability Day (WUD), also known as “Make Things Easier Day” (Bedore, 2026), was established in 2005 by the Usability Professionals Association (UPA), now known as the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) International. WUD occurs annually to promote the values of usability, usability engineering, user-centered design, universal usability, and every user’s responsibility to ask for things to work better. The day is held on the second Thursday of November and adopts a different theme each year.
World Usability Day started as an idea sprung from a discussion in the fall of 2004 between two UPA board members, Elizabeth Rosenzweig and Nigel Bevan. They worked together with the UPA board to start World Usability Day and over the years, Elizabeth Rosenzweig has kept it running (WCD Events, 2021).
“World Usability Day was established to focus people on the problems and subsequent solutions related to usability. We want to raise people’s awareness of how much these problems impact all of us. If we can get thousands of people on the planet to focus on one thing for one day, we can accomplish something big. It only takes one day to change someone’s point of view, or to light a fire that can burn for years.” – Elizabeth Rosenzweig (2006)
Across more than 140 countries, WUD has engaged over 250,000 individuals and had an impact on their local communities. World Usability Day has opened up the field of UX and usability in places where it did not exist before the event, such as Eastern Europe (including Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and Turkey) (Rosenzweig, Davis, Liu, Bosley, 2024).
References
Bedore, T. (2006, November 14). How About Make Things Easier Day?” [Radio Program]. American Public Media. http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2006/11/14/PM200611148.html
Rosenzweig, E. (2006). World Usablity Day: A Challenge for Everyone. The Journal of User Experience, 1(4), 151-155.
Rosenzweig, E., Davis, A., Liu, Z. & Bosley, D. (2024, January 2). Usability: The Essential Ingredient for Sustainable World Development. ACM Interactions. https://interactions.acm.org/blog/view/usability-the-essential-ingredient-for-sustainable-world-development
WCD Events. (2021, November 10). World Usability Day. World Celebration Days. https://wcdevents.home.blog/november/worldusabilityday/
