Welcome. Our aim is to give an overview of the main events and debates in the Usability world. This time we've included a couple of press releases describing recent developments at our company.

On Friday 25th January the RNIB hosted their quarterly conference raising the profile of web accessibility. This quarter, Macromedia joined RNIB on the platform. Macromedia are proactively trying to help web designers and producers to make not only fun and cool but also USABLE and ACCESSIBLE websites for the 21st century. They demonstrated a range of offerings that represent a real commitment to increased accessibility.

These include plugins for Dreamweaver that will automatically check the accessibility of the given pages against WAI guidelines and settings in Flash that will dump the plain text within a movie into the HTML that embeds it. They are also working on functionality in Flash that will allow the "Back" button to work in a more traditional fashion within movies rather than replaying them from the beginning. All these developments should help accessibility for the visually impaired and the overall usability of new sites.

This is warmly received.

Usability research comes in many forms and varieties. It can be as simple as "peer review" a technique where the designer may ask a colleague, preferably from another team or someone not associated with the project, to comment on a design or section of a design with a fresh attitude, right up to complex integrated testing of  for example, air traffic control systems with real flight controllers.

Read more about Usability Research Techniques

The Usability Company and Usability Sciences Corporation (USC) announced in March the UK launch of WebIQ, the only online, client-side technology that can be easily and cost-effectively deployed to gather intelligence on ALL the key qualitative metrics of website effectiveness. 

London-based "The Usability Company" and Dallas-based Usability Sciences Corp. (USC) announced in early March a transatlantic partnership designed to provide global clients with a consistent approach to website usability testing and research. 

Usability is a term new to many, but it is a science rooted in the cold war era of military research.