The Society for Technical Communication (STC), the world’s largest association for technical communicators, has announced its support for World Usability Day, Tuesday, November 14, 2006. This event is organized by the Usability Professionals’ Association, which is sponsoring a series of events that promote the values and benefits of usability engineering and user-centered design. All events will take place over a 36-hour period. Individuals and organizations in more than 30 countries around the world are participating.

As part of World Usability Day, STC and CM Pros, an organization of content management professionals, are organizing a global online card-sort exercise. Card sorting is a fast, cheap, reliable technique way to determine how people categorize information. This knowledge helps information architects and usability professionals create structures for print and online information that make products and technologies more usable. STC’s card-sort exercise will be carried out by participants living and working all over the world, and is expected to provide insights about regional variations in the ways people organize information.

“STC’s involvement in World Usability Day is a logical extension of technical communication,” says Paula Berger, president of STC. “Everything that technical communicators do is about usability, whether making instructions more usable through better writing, interfaces more usable because of better labeling and navigation, or products more usable because of user testing. It’s all part of the same continuum.”

It is not necessary to be a member of one of the sponsoring organizations in order to join in the exercise. Anyone interested in participating can sign up at http://www.stc.org/wud. The exercise is made possible by the donation of WebSort software (http://www.websort.net) from Parallax, LLC.