Some animal logos chilling together in the Web 2.OO.. I mean ZOO. Can you recognize where they belong?
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August 6, 2009 • 8:16 pm 0
Indian Families as Consumers
The Big Picture
* There are approx. 226 million families in India (72 mn urban, 154 mn rural)
* 25 mn families (11% of all families) have more than 1 earning member
* 28 mn Indians (2.5%) prefer to read in English, marginally more than Malayalam
* Average monthly family income in India is Rs.5,930 (‘per capita’ is Rs.1,350)
* 70% of all Indian families earn average to below-average incomes
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August 5, 2009 • 2:52 pm 1
Vista Features I Would Like in Win7
I hope these Vista features stay in Windows 7, which make small but positively significant differences to the user experience.
1 Bite-sized Breadcrumbs- Easier to navigate than the previous Windows explorer tree view
2 Hiding the menu (File, Edit, View, Tools..) and showing only the most relevant menu items highlights simplicity for the average user.
3 Favorite Links (option of adding your own folders)
4 Extra Large Icons (ideal eye candy for image and magazines- could be the default display option for multimedia folders)
Easy Keyboard Navigation (being a heavy keyboard user, I like these to be added)
5 Keyboard shortcut Alt+UP (more intuitve than backspace)
6 When going back a level in the explorer, focus remains on the file/folder where you started from.
7 To rename a file, pressing F2 highlights only the name and does not include the extension (nice!)
8 The brain-friendly menu system aka the ribbon should extend its presence to native Windows applications (like Movie Maker).
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August 4, 2009 • 6:48 pm 0
Tags
Tag Clouds dont work for me. Reasons-
1 A tag cloud is all visual clutter, no information (or wisdom).
2 Only big text shows clearly, what about all others? Are the small ones only there to be ignored?
3 No one except the creator knows how the tags are interlinked.
4 You cant expect to find what you are looking for by clicking on a tag (which unfortunately is their purpose).
Seems to me tags are very “individualistic” in nature and does not help for a visitor or as a community feature.
Examples of tags- gmail labels, del.icio.us tags, google notbook tags, imdb keywords
If only tag clouds could look something like this..
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March 18, 2009 • 11:25 pm 1
Unofficial Guide to Google Search
Am putting down some points that I use to do secondary research using Google and other sites.
0. Question Yourself
Before asking Google, ask yourself- “What do I Want to Know About?” Always mention places (where) and times (when). This will refine your query and easier to search for Google.
Place
Always think- Where? It can be a place in the physical world, but in the virtual world too. Mention countries, cities, (India, Boston) or virtual places (Microsoft Website, Windows XP, Recycle Bin)
Time
Always mention the time – 1940s, 2012, August, “six months”. Think- When?
1. Read!!
(Note: If you don’t like to read from a screen, please start liking it.)
2. Use Magic Words
Some keywords, when added to a query, helps you find more accurate answers. Here are a few that I use for research. You can think of new ones as you search. Examples are in brackets and the magic words are in bold.
* How do the best people do a certain job? (best practices mobile learning)
* What will happen to Indian retail industry in 2 years? (trends Indian retail industry)
* I mostly use it for software issues like a computer virus (troubleshooting xp win32.dll not found)
* To find more about the landscape of a new domain (online bingo market Europe) or (online bingo industry)
* Want to compare two phones, two religions, two cities.. (Jessica Alba vs Jessica Biel). Other substitutes could be Comparison or Better Than
* For marketing/ user research data (demographic cameraphone users japan)
* To see what people are saying about a certain product or service (canon EOS 40D review)
* (video tutorial podcasting)
* Good for finding summary of events, annual briefings (McKinsey 2008 report web2.0)
* Who’s who of a certain topic (2008 top 10 pop songs US )
* To find free goodies (free blu-ray disc burner)
3. Search Other Places
Digital format makes everything sharable over the internet- photos, newspaper articles, maps, TV program snippets (news, sitcoms), documentaries, conference talks, presentations, books, magazines, music…. and all of them can be searched too! Think of how will information you are looking for is likely to be represented (in a video, image, ppt, presentation, book, map or blog). You can search directly on some sites if you know what you are looking for-
YouTube- for videos, tutorials, gadget reviews, ads..
Slideshare- for presentations
StockXChange, Creative Commons Search- for free images
SmashingMagazine- for free icons and other free graphic design resources
Google Scholar- for academic papers
Amazon- for searching books and book reviews
Twitter- for searching hottest topics (happening right Now) that you won’t find in blogs or newspaper sites (I came to know details about the SriLankan crickt team attack in Lahore through twitter before anywhere else).
If Google repeatedly throws up a site for information (wikipedia, for example), you can directly go to the site and search too.
4. Make Search Come to You
Use Google Alerts to make Google search for you and send results via email. For example- I get daily results for the term ‘usability’ to my gmail. The results are unique and sometimes insightful. And I don’t even have to search for it!
5inally, don’t be afraid to open lots of links
You’ll find the information quicker.
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September 2, 2008 • 10:51 pm 0
Overflow of Cover Flows
Ever since Apple bough cover flow, it has fascinated many by its graceful display and ease of browsing information. Clones of cover-flow are now floating across the web, here are some of them we can use.
SpaceTime- A browser plug-in which shows you everything in 3D- search results, ebay products, browser windows..
SearchMe- This is a search engine which shows results (web pages) in a coverflow format.
FotoViewr- You can use widgets provided by this site to put ’stunning 3D galleries’ in Facebook, iGoogle, WordPress.
Cool Iris- This browser plug-in shows all related media of a page as an interactive 3d wall. Crashes my firefox a lot, but worth a look.
TouchFlo 3D- HTC is putting this technology in every upcoming phone of theirs. Faces are great to watch in a cover flow format, as mentioned elsewhere too.
TiltViewer- This free application displays 25 photos at a time in a very nice way. See it in action.
Even Microsoft has introduced this look for their new xbox 360 dashboard interface.
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August 25, 2008 • 10:48 pm 0
Photosynth- The Missing Picture
Photosynth makes a 3D image composed of a collection of images created by thousands of people all over the world. It got out of ‘beta’ recently after we saw the promising demos for two years. I still dont see why would anyone use this..
Wont it be an elegant and easier solution to shoot a panoramic HD video and let an application make an interactive 3D picture out of it? You can do that easily in Flash (PC) or Final Cut Pro (Mac) link
Of course, its the ’social’ angle that makes Photosynth special, but then we have to assume that everyone will click pictures from a different angle. I went to the Photosynth site and saw the Taj Mahal. All key photos are by National Geographic. A similar effort by London Eye shows all images being clicked by a professional photographer.
So, tourists like you and me will click a million photos at the front bench with the Taj in the background, and 10 photos on other places, how will 3D space will be created?
Some things that would excite me with such an application-
1 See a place at different times (photos of Taj at day/evening/ night).
2 Use of Videos to create a 3D picture (will be much easier for a person to shoot a video)
3 Filters to see only those photos which I clicked.
4 Click on a particular place in the 3D picture and see all photos associated with it.
5 Release it as an API for dedicated communities like Flickr where everyone is trying to show something unique.
Scenario: if there’s a wedding, then can it show us the whole venue in 3D if the photos of every digital camera at the event were uploaded? And perhaps a slide show with photos appearing the time they were clicked? Then, it’ll be magic. Right now, its not.
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July 15, 2008 • 10:51 am 0
… and the User will Follow
This will be a growing post. As I find them, this post will have a collection of views to a different approach for designing products.
Here are some quotes from guys who do not employ standard usability practices to collect user requirements, or do not make designs based on usability principles or don’t test prototypes with users.
What I will get to is-
There is no one way of making a great product. A great product always addresses the right questions with the right answers. (Click on the icons to read from the source)
Flickr (Catrina Fake)
“What did you do for usability testing?”
- Almost none, got it out early as Paul also suggested
- Flickr Alpha was the usability testing- “put it out with its zits and blemishes”
- Heavy monitoring of/posting on their support forums
- “Users don’t have a problem teling you that something really sucks…”
Google (Marissa Mayer)
“When I first started testing in 2000, we tested once a month. Now, we’re user testing almost every week. We’ll do a site-wide test once a month or so, with some tasks, but more free-form, just to see where people go, where they encounter problems. The other three weeks of the month, we test specific features. Adwords, for example, is a new product that’s big enough that it needs its own test – it can’t be layered into a sitewide test. So we test every 10 days, usually with eight users each. We want to find the big problems, and with eight users we definitely get to that level.
Popcap (Casual Game Creators)
“So we’re building games that are fun for us first. That’s the first test. After that, we try to make them more accessible to everyone else.
Conversely, we get asked if we make games specifically for women. It’s one of the challenges when we talk about the company. People think it’s games for girls. More of our customers are women than men. They ask us if we do focus tests with soccer moms. We don’t.
We don’t really track development costs to see how much time we spent. I liken it to other creative processes like writing a novel. How much does it cost to write a novel? Does it matter? It’s more about how can you get a good novel written. The creating of the novel is hard to measure.”
Steve Jobs’ perspective on “designing for you”
“We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.”
37 Signals (Basecamp creators)
“Designing for ourselves first yields better initial results because it lets us design what we know. It lets us assess quality quickly and directly, instead of by proxy. And it lets us fall in love with our products and feel passionate about what we make. There’s simply no substitute for that.
David Lewis (Bang & Olufsen)
“All designers for B&O — not just me and my team of six — are external. The company believes in it. My six-member team aside, designers for B&O don’t ever meet, we don’t have any cooperation with one another at all.”
“Today there’s too much pressure, not just for designers. It’s disappointing in a way. You can miss cool things — afterthoughts, great little ideas — in the design process because it goes so fast.”
“I think you can’t go out and ask people what they need or want because they don’t know. The whole trick is to come out with a product and say, “Have you thought of this?” and hear the consumer respond, “Wow! No, I hadn’t.” If you can do that, you’re on.”
Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce
“The mind doesnt know what the tongue wants.”
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July 9, 2008 • 12:54 pm 0
Newly Hatched!
I have barely gotten used to Twitter (use it to write one-liners, getting news updates and making a plan with friends) and now the mother bird has given rise (or birth) to a brand new desi twitter called SMSGupShup (rhymes with Numsum- Gupshup means gossip). Its by the guys who started Webaroo (the “offline” wikipdia).
Personally, the mobile is a very exciting market for India with the breadth of users spreading from very low-end phones to very smart-phones. India has a far more reach of mobile (about 250 million mobile-literate as compared to 65 million pc literate). SMS is already being used in India for a lot of utilitarian services like sending climate forecast to farmers and selecting best prices for selling their crops/vegetables. A service in India will really be a mass success if it solves basic problems at the rural level or is finanace -related.
Meanwhile, you can read about SMSGupShup on GigaOm. However, I do not believe the traffic numbers that SMSGupShup have published and still believe Twitter has much higher traffic. I have signed up just now and I hope I dont get spammed!
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