Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic

A great post examining the two contrasting visual approaches employed by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in their presentations.
You will definitely enjoy this one. Click here to read this great post.

Cheers!

UI Cartoon

Designing using a systematic process based on the best usability practices is our mantra!

Ms Dewey

A search engine with a 'sexy' difference!
Ms Dewey comes and asks you strange questions, says spooky thing to catch your attention, powered by Microsoft's Live Search, Ms Dewey is an amazaing search engine.

Cheers!

Now thats Collaboration!

Talking with Orkut

Yes, you read it right.. talking with Orkut is now possible. Google is continuing with its innovation process and has built Google Talk into Orkut.

Sounds groovy.. right? For more details and how to use it, click here.

Cheers!

The Google Story

The Google Story by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed is a great read. Get your copy soon and learn great things about its founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, their philosophy and the inside world of Googleplex.


If you are a big fan of Google, drop in regularly to Google's Official Bog for latest insights from the hottest firm.

The Dilbert Principle

With appraisal at my workplace around the corner and seeing the signs of things to come, it was inevitable for me to fall to the Dilbert Principle.

The Dilbert Principle refers to a 1990s satirical observation stating that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management, in order to limit the amount of damage that they're capable of doing.

How true the dude Scott Adams was or is!

Have a look at one of the strip:

Dilbert truly rocks, to read more on Dilbert, click here.

[Post inspired by enginerd]

Cheers!

Everyday Usability

Scene at Bangalore Railway Station. Where do we go for platform 5, right or left?

For some more fun examples of everyday usability, click here.

End of an Era?

With 7 time World Champion, Micheal Schumacher retiring from Formula 1, he has left behind a huge void in the Ferrari camp and perhaps in F1.

He graced F1 for 16 years and broke almost all possible records. But he would be just a touch disappointed that he couldn't win the Brazilian Grand Prix, his career's final race.

Many believe that F1 minus Micheal will never be the same and may even cease to exist. But as is always the case, with end of one era, a new one begins..

If that's the case perhaps we may now witness the new era of the Spaniard, the 2 time world champion, Fernando Alonso..

Long Live Formula 1..

Cheers!

Heuristic Evaluation

Heuristic Evaluation (HE) is defined as "Inspection of an interface against usability heuristics, with the goal of identifying usability issues." It is conducted by 3-5 trained evaluators and it does not involve end users.

Problems can be identified across several UI categories - Branding, Site Strategy, Navigation, Layout, Wording, Graphics, Animation, Color, Fonts, Control Elements, Web Standards, Error Handling etc.

Usually following severity types are considered:

1. Showstoppers – Catastrophic issues that prevent people from accomplishing their goals.
2. Major Issues – Issues that cause waste of time, increased learning and error rates
3. Irritants – Minor cosmetic or consistency issues that slow users down slightly / are a minimal violation of usability guidelines

Here are couple of examples of a typical HE:

Cheers!

Particpation Inequality

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

Click here to read the article by Jakob Nielsen where he talks how participation inequality affects the web.

Cheers!

Frame by Frame Playback in Windows Media Player 10/11

Just in case you have not tried this yet…

You can do frame-by-frame playback in Windows Media Player 10 by enabling ‘Play Speed Settings’. (View > Enhancements > Play Speed Settings)

Cheers!

Kicking Nielsen!

Celebrating the 100th post at technophobic via some skepticism!

I always thought Jakob Nielsen was the unchallengable guru of usability but here are a list of few articles which challenge his invincibility and mock the king of usability! Check them out..

1. Jakob Nielsen Drinking Game

2. How usable is Jakob Nielsen?

3. Spanking Jakob Nielsen



Cheers!

How UI design has to incorporate the good and the bad..

An interesting article by Mike Padilla tells us that how designing the UI is fundamentally an exercise in compromise—not compromise between designers and other project stakeholders —but compromise between the drawbacks and benefits of design decisions.

Click here to read the article.

Cheers!

Card Sorting Technique

How to discover the user’s model of information space?
How to start with the information architecture process?
How to validate the information architecture?

Though these questions don't have a straight forward answer, but Card Sorting Technique eases out most of the complexity from these questions.

Card Sorting is a technique for exploring how people group items, so that you can develop structures that maximize the probability of users being able to find items. It is a quick, inexpensive, and reliable method, which serves as input into your information design process. Card sorting generates an overall structure for your information, as well as suggestions for navigation, menus, and possible taxonomies.

How it is done?

[via useit]

Card sorting is done by giving users a bunch of index cards with concepts from the server written on them. The users were then asked to sort the cards into piles such that cards representing similar concepts were in the same pile. The users were also allowed to group piles to indicate looser levels of similarity, and we finally asked the users to name their piles. These names provided us with additional insights into the users' mental model of the information space and served as inspiration for the names we finally chose.

For more information, you can visit this link.

Cheers!

Engineer or Designer?!

I was in hibernation for last few months but Iam back now in a new avatar! From being an engineer I have turned into a User Interface Designer in one of India's top-notch corporate design setup.

Interesting? Well I will furnish more details later on.. for the time being, here is a pic of my office building which is famously known as The Studio.

"CON"

Say the word "CON" in front of Bill Gates and his face is bound to get red because of embarrassment. Apparantely on Windows XP, one cannot create a folder named "CON". Creating a new folder with the name "CON" just renames it to "New Folder". Microsoft team has no answers for this screw-up. Don't belive it, try for yourself!

Cheers!

Why Google needs Orkut?!

A ubiquitous question which has been even answered many a times. But for the ignorant junta Jeremy Zawodny lucidy explains why Google badly needs Orkut and how they are banking on the viral fever of social networking sites.

Click here to read the article.

Cheers!

PS: Feels good to be back at the helm after a long hiatus. Lot of good things have happened but lot of confusion has also persisted, but its time to move on!

15 year old fools around with Google News credibility

A practical joke resulting in international tech story.. doesn't get better than this!

[via Stepforth]
15-year old Tom Vandetta, Vandetta found an article that explained how to fool Google's news system by writing fake press releases. Sensing an opportunity to experiment and play a joke on his friends, the self-described "Google fanboy" decided to see what would happen if he submitted a fake Google press release claiming the 15-year old New Jersey student was Google's youngest employee. The press release was issued through the free service I-Newswire and contained a number of spelling mistakes.

(I-Newswire) - 15 year old student, Tom Vendetta has been hired by search engine giant Google Inc. The student will receive a lowered salary, which will be placed into a bank account for future education, said Google CEO Larry Page. When asked what role Vendetta will play at the Tech Giant's offices, Page said he wouldnt have a role at the Main Offices. Instead he would work from his home in the New Jersey suburbs. Vendetta will be incharge of working with recent security flaw's in Google's beta e-mail service, "Gmail". Google said they first found out about him when they discovered the student's blog, at http://tomvendetta.be. The media giant said they looked forward to working with Vendetta's expertise in JavaScript and AJAX.

A few hours after posting the fake press release, Vandetta logged into the news search tool Digg after receiving an automated email from MAKEBot (Digg's Spider), to find his practical joke had become a credible international tech story. Google was even displaying reference to the press release in Google News and at in the news results placed above search results relating to Google employment or hiring. According to his confessional blog posting, "At that moment, I felt my stomach knot up and my heart drop. I knew exactly what happened and knew that I would end up regretting posting that."

While the prank was a juvenile as it was creative, Vandetta's fake press release has exposed a credibility problem for Google and might introduce new costs for search marketing firms that use legitimate press releases as a means of promotion. His experiment exposed the fact the automated system that is Google News does not verify press releases before publishing them as factual news pieces.

Its hard to imagine, Google falling prey to this but it all exposes that there is still a long way to go before we say digital age has truly arrived and is away from all the glitches.

Cheers!

Pi Day!

March 14 is celebrated as Pi day.. can't get it?!

March 14, written as 3-14 in the United States date format, represents the common three-digit approximation for the mathematical constant π: 3.14. It is often celebrated at 1:59 p.m. in recognition of the six-digit approximation: 3.14159

Wierd, but cool right?

[courtesy: shutterediris]

Cheers!

PS: Herez wishing the readers a very happy and colourful holi :)

A day to remember for sport lovers!

Iam on a high!
One of the greatest day in history of sport entertainment was recorded today and I witnessed it (on TV that is!).

It began with start of 2006 F1 season and champion Fernando Alonso muscled his way around Ferrari ace Micheal Schumacher in some spectacular driving to win the inaugral Bahrain race.

Meanwhile records were tumbling at Johannesburg Cricket Stadium, South Africa. In the series decider the invincible Aussies smacked 434/4 in their stipulated 50 overs, a world record for highest ODI total.

They broke a 10 year world record but little they knew that this record was about to be broken again in less than 4 hours! South Africa, backed by brilliant knocks by Gibbs and Smith chased the score in a cliffhanger of a match. They won by 1 wicket and with 1 ball to spare. Anyone who is remotely interested in cricket and somehow missed the match.. well he has missed the match of the lifetime!!

What a day it has been today..

Cheers!

Perfect recipe for sadist Webmasters

The world is full of sadist characters and when they turn out to be webmasters, they cook up a perfect recipe to irritate visitors and ensure that they never come back!
Click here to read the top 12 favourite irritants ensuring no returning visitors for your website.

PS: You can combine more than one irritant to gain more pleasure :D

Cheers!

The Best of Web 2.0

After an unexpected hiatus from my regular activities, Iam back to resume blogging in full glory.

Every now and then, we are seeing new and hot web applications coming up, which are redefining the power of web. Herez a peek into the Best of Web 2.0 sites; these sites are one on which the whole world is going gaga over. Barring couple of websites, I think all are very popular in our college itself.

Cheers!

Tiny URL

We often have very long URL and sending them to someone or remembering them is a sort of problem. TinyURL is here to the rescue. An example to show their working:

Turn this URL:

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?ovi=1&mqma
p.x=300&mqmap.y=75&mapdata=%252bKZmeiIh6N%252bI
gpXRP3bylMaN0O4z8OOUkZWYe7NRH6ldDN96YFTIUmSH3Q6
OzE5XVqcuc5zb%252fY5wy1MZwTnT2pu%252bNMjOjsHjvN
lygTRMzqazPStrN%252f1YzA0oWEWLwkHdhVHeG9sG6cMrf
XNJKHY6fML4o6Nb0SeQm75ET9jAjKelrmqBCNta%252bsKC
9n8jslz%252fo188N4g3BvAJYuzx8J8r%252f1fPFWkPYg%
252bT9Su5KoQ9YpNSj%252bmo0h0aEK%252bofj3f6vCP

into this tinyURL:

http://tinyurl.com/6

Which one would you rather cut and paste into your browser? That's the power of TinyURL!

TinyURL is amazingly powerful, and as they say tiny is better, so go and explore this tiny thing.

Cheers!

Design Speak: Seminar on User Centered Design

To describe Design Speak, Annual Event @ NID in one word would be DISAPPOINTING. Theme of the seminar was User Centered Design (UCD). Seminar started with an introductory lecture from Dr. Eric Schaffer, CEO HFI. Absolutely no content in his talk and I found him to be a Jabberwocky! Same was true for all the speakers who followed. Though every speaker had exceptional profile but no one could justify the topic of the seminar and at the end of the day, Usability still remains a field which is not science and is just matter of common sense.

Anyways some very few points that I found useful in the seminar were:

• ISO process can make UCD more reliable and person independent.
• Times New Roman font was designed to compress characters and put more text in limited space.
• Verdana font was primarily designed for screen based interface.
• Minimize the load on the user on following counts - visual, intellect, and memory.
• The Design Process: Idenity Need -> Create brief -> Brainstorming -> Data Gathering -> Redesign Brief -> Conceptualize -> Validate Concepts -> Final Design
• Punctuations can be made bigger than normal text to attract attention.

These were the points from inital few lectures, after that I dozed off. Just on our way back, visited NIDUS, NID's Design Outlet, displays products made by NID graduates, and proffessors.. though touch expensive but very nice.

I hope, future seminar/workshops based on this theme would be more insightful. One such workshop is scheduled soon at Synapse. For details, click here.

Cheers!

Personal Note

technophobic takes a break from technology today and is uploaded with a rather personal note.

People,
Iam Celebrating

Because Iam 21 now,
Officially ready for Marriage!

EDIT (Feb 12, 2006): Yesterday's crap removed.

Cheers People!
-m0r0N

"Live LiFE and sTop ANalyzing iT."

rediff completes 10 years

rediff is 10 years old now, read this effusive message from the founder himself:

A message from Ajit Balakrishnan, Founder, rediff.com

Ten years ago, on a day like today when Bombay's mild winter was slowly sliding in, a small band of programmers, writers, designers, management specialists got together on a mission.

The mission was to create a platform for people to meet and interact. One that would rival the best in the world.

Ten years later the small original group has grown to include many other like-minded creative spirits.

The platform that we collaboratively created is admired in many countries of the world. Sophisticated investors value us highly; discerning digerati come visit us every morning.

The world admires our creative and independent spirit and expects great things from us.

The journey is just beginning.

Cheers!

egoSurf

egoSurf: ego surfing without the guilt

It was this tagline which took me to the website of egoSurf. egoSurf finds your blog ranking in Google. Its working is simple, you enter your name and your blogs web address. They search google and find links to your blog and thus, calculate your ego ranking. For more insight, visit their FAQ section or much better straight away head to egoSurf and calculate your blog ranking.

PS: I won't tell my egoRanking, way too low :(

Cheers!

Perception about HCI in India

It was during my research internship last year that I developed interest in the field of HCI. At that point of time, I found it to be very interesting, innovative and creative. But all of a sudden a lot many people from my college has ventured into this field, not because its creative, but they think HCI gives them the perfect platform to break away from the coding paradigm and still call themselves technocrats. This is kinda irritating (Iam not at all expert but still) because this attitude belittles the importance of this field.

Dr. Dinesh Katre, HCI guru echoes my concern and has written a superb article highlighting the above points in a very lucid manner.

People have a superficial belief that HCI does not require training or special skills (the minimum eligibility crierion is to be born as a human!). Many IT companies perceive that software usability process is a fad like ISO and CMM, which must be complied with because it is the current fashion in developed countries. Some are attracted to it because you can charge the customer more for fancy things like context study and affinity maps. Some feel that it is just a new terminology to be used while discussing user interfaces.

You get the feel where this article is heading, so anyone and everyone related to HCI should read this article and all those creeps who think HCI is just a fancy word, this article is a must for them.

Cheers!

Do you like flickr logo?

If you do like flickr logo, then unleashing to you flickr logo maker, which allows you to make your own personalised logo in flickr style. I made one for myself:

Cheers!

Paper Prototyping

Concentrate on paper work before the actual work!

This funda applies to design of interfaces as well and is called Paper Prototyping. Paper prototyping is a cheap and fast technique for rapid iterative design of user interfaces. Here are a few examples:

Paper prototype of typical forms-filling screen.



Paper prototype of a tabs-based design.

Testing hardware user interfaces: mockup of a kiosk.

[via Nielsen Norman Group]

Cheers!

Gates vs Jobs: Whoz the hero?

Gates vs Jobs: The ubiquitous question in the tech world!

Without doubt both are genius, Without doubt both are living legends. But enter into tech world and you could find them to be star attractions of all conspiracy theories. Both seem to have an uncanny knack of attracting accusations. Read the article here which compares the two maven's.
My pick of the hero will be Steve Jobs, primarily because of his love for creativity and innovation. I was and I still am completely bowled by IPod's User Interface, only Apple could have come up with such a product!

Cheers!

Mozart's Birthday

Google Logo's always fascinate me primarily because they celebrate all events including events which one would really not remember though they are important. Thanks to google.com for spreading the word that today is Mozart's Birthday. Kudos to Google team for regularly coming up with such catchy and dynamic logos.

Cheers!

Web Design & Usability Guidelines

A web resource which will be cherished by Web Designers.

National Cancer Institute has build a site which is designed to provide over 50 of the top Web design and usability guidelines based on emerging research and supporting information in the field. Click here to explore the wealth of usability information.

Cheers!

Nokia Concept Lounge

Take few minutes out, sit back and explore this fantastic design idea from Nokia. Nokia Concept Lounge is a must checkout to understand how creativity can be unleashed in websites.

Cheers!

Bill Gates at a recent conference!

Photowhere

One problem with digital cameras is that they tend to name their pictures in a cryptic fashion (i.e. DSC0034.jpg).

To help users organize and retrieve digital photographs, a system has been developed, entitled PhotoWhere, which annotates digital photographs automatically with relevant keywords based on data from a GPS receiver and the World Wide Web.
Using a GPS receiver, the system tags each picture with the specific GPS coordinates where it was taken. The system then queries a geographical database that indexes web pages by GPS coordinates, which produces a set of web pages that are associated with these coordinates. Next, these web pages are analyzed using a combination of standard and unique information retrieval techniques in order to best determine what the web pages are about, or even better, what topics and keywords they have in common. From this information, an accurate annotation of about 5-10 relevant keywords is deduced. These keywords are presented to the user in real-time, right after s/he took the picture, thereby giving the user instantaneous information about the place where they are taking a picture. The keywords are also stored with the picture to facilitate keyword-based (and location-based) search and retrieval of pictures from a database.

Photowhere is Interactive Experience Group, MIT Media Labortary project. These people sure are helluva creative bunch!

Cheers!

New age concept of "Six Degrees of Separation"

Six degrees of separation is the theory that anyone on earth can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries.

Social networking sites like Orkut have been pitched as the internet version of the 'six degrees of separation' supposedly connecting most people, first proposed by psychologist Stanley Milgram and Ithiel de Sola Pool. Click here, to read this interesting article which relates the theory to these sites.

Cheers!

Water resistant PC from Intel @ Rs. 10K

[via Rediff]
Intel Corporation, in an attempt to bridge the digital divide in India, is planning to launch a personal computer priced below Rs 10,000 by this year-end. The global IT major is also on track with its earlier announced plans of investing over $1 billion in the country for its research and development (R&D) initiatives. It is also planning to look at newer locations for setting up centres, in addition to its Bangalore facility.

"We are working on the sub-Rs 10,000 PC and expect it to be commercially available by the end of this financial year. The PC will enable India to become one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world," Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice-president and general manager (sales and marketing group), told reporters on Tuesday.

Click here to read the entire article.

Cheers!

10 World Changing Web Moments

Webby Awards team has unveiled a list of 10 web moments that changed the web. It talks about the dotcom boom and bust, napster shutdown, 9/11 and much more.

Click here to go through the 10 World Changing Web Moments.

BTW, Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence in Web design, creativity, usability and functionality. They are calling in entries for 10th annual webby award, so if you think you have a creative and innovative website at your disposal, just enter your site to win Oscar of the Internet.

Cheers!

Executable Internet or XInternet

Read George F. Colony's article which claims, the web will fade and new paradigm of XInternet will come up and replace web in about 2-3 years!

Cheers!

Software Aging and Rejuvenation

Common saying goes that only humans age and get themselves rejuvinated. But apparantely Prof. Kishore Trivedi has brought this idea into software paradigm as well. According to him,

Software Aging is:

• Deterioration in the availability of OS resources, data corruption and numerical error accumulation.
• Potential fault conditions gradually accumulating over time leading to either performance degradation or transient failures or both.

Manifestation of aging is seen with performance degradation, crash/hang failure etc. Windows 95 is one such example.

Software Rejuvenation is:

• It is a proactive fault management technique aimed at cleaning up the system internal state to prevent the occurrence of more severe crash failures in the future. It involves occasionally terminating an application or a system, cleaning its internal state and restarting it.

Current methods of software rejuvenation include system restart, application restart (partial rejuventaion).


It seems to be a very interesting idea and is soon starting to become a hot research topic. For more info, click here.

Cheers!

New Year Greetings

Wishing one and all a very happy and colourful new year!

Moron is back after a long overdue vacation. New year resolution: Have a blast on everyday of the year!! Keep up with this space for technological odyssey 2006..

Cheers!