Participate in World Usability Day and win $50.

We’re awarding two $50 cash prizes to the most interesting usablity tickets posted to flickr. What do we mean by interesting? Anything that stands out as unusual–e.g. an unusual product, technology, or person(!?). Your description counts, too…unusual reasons for why you love or hate the product will certainly garner votes among the judges!

And what do we mean by usability? Think about products that never work the way you expect. You press one button expecting the thing to start and instead it turns off. That's a usability issue. Many products have good usability--from something as simple as a door that opens how you expect it to open to a cell phone that makes calling your friends super-easy.

Share your joys and frustrations--and enter the contest--by downloading the usability ticket and following these instructions:

1. Find a product or object or...whatever. Just something that either never works the way you expect or something that always exceeds your expectations.
2. Take a picture or screenshot.
3. Post the picture to flickr. (If you don’t already have an account, you will need to create one, but it is fast and free.)
4. Tag the item with "uticket" (without the quotes). This is extremely important as we won't be able to review the item you’ve ticketed unless you tag it with uticket (short for usability ticket). Feel free to add other tags to the photo as well (eg "usability", "design", "broken"). Wikipedia has more information on tagging (aka folksonomies).
5. Explain yourself! Add a comment on the item that describes why you ticketed the item. Love it? Hate it? Let us know!
6. Complete the citation and attach it the item for others to discover; use the usability violation for items with poor usability and the usability commendation for the things that exceed your expectations. Both are in the PDF!
7. Repeat!

The deadline to be considered for the contest is Thursday at noon. We’ll announce the winners during the ticket review on Thursday. The only catch is that you must attend the event in order to receive the cash. If you don’t show, you don’t get the dough. (Yeah, definitely not one of my better attempts at a rhyme.)

And, lastly, a big thanks to Todd Robert who designed the usability ticket for us. :-) Thanks, Todd!

Now print some tickets and get started!