The Society for Technical Communication (STC), the world’s largest association for technical communicators, today announced its support for World Usability Day (www.worldusabilityday.org), Tuesday, November 14, 2006.

Primarily sponsored by the Usability Professionals' Association, World Usability Day is a series of events that promote the values and benefits of usability engineering and user-centered design. The events will take place over a 36-hour period in more than 30 countries around the globe.

“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.”

As part of World Usability Day, STC and CM Pros (www.cmprofessionals.org), an organization of content management professionals, are organizing a global online card-sort exercise. The exercise is made possible by the donation of WebSort software (www.websort.net) from Parallax, LLC.

Card sorting is a quick, inexpensive, and reliable technique for determining 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 on five continents. The exercise will provide insights about regional variations in the ways people organize information. Anyone interested in participating in this valuable exercise can sign up at www.stc.org/wud.

About STC:
The Society for Technical Communication is a professional organization for technical writers, editors, illustrators, managers, and educators. It is the largest professional organization in this field, with more than 14,000 members in 138 chapters worldwide. Information about STC and its programs can be found at the STC Web site: www.stc.org