Yahoo! trying to catch up

Google has been working on the idea of Online library for over a year now and now Yahoo! is trying to catch up. Guess, they have realized that this idea is a hot cake, so today Yahoo! came up with plans to build a vast online library of books and multimedia files.

Check out this piece of news:

INTERNET group Yahoo! today outlined plans to build a vast online library of books and multimedia files that will address publishers' copyright concerns.

The Open Content Alliance, a project that the search engine is backing with several other partners, plans to provide digital versions of books, academic papers, video and audio. Much of the material will consist of copyrighted material voluntarily submitted by publishers and authors.

Other participants in the alliance include software firm Adobe Systems, PC maker Hewlett-Packard, the Internet Archive, O'Reilly Media, the University of California and the University of Toronto. The potentially vast library would be searchable and freely available to anyone, whether individual web surfers or commercial sites.

Although Yahoo! will power the search engine located at www.opencontentalliance.org, all the content will be made available so it can be indexed by all the other major search engines, including that of rival Google. By joining the project, Yahoo! is hoping to upstage Google, which has a one-year head start on scanning and indexing books so more literature and academic research can be accessed from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.

David Mandelbrot, Yahoo!'s vice president of search content, said: "We are building a collaborative effort that will make a great deal of copyrighted material available in a way that's acceptable to the creators. That is novel."

Guess in this fight of supremacy between Yahoo and Google, we users will probably emerge as winners because of free access to loads of materials.

Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week, celebrated this year from September 24 - October 1, came to an end yesterday. Herez a short note on Banned Books Week:

Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read is observed during the last week of September each year. Observed since 1982, the annual event reminds Americans not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted.

Banned Books Week (BBW) celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. After all, intellectual freedom can exist only where these two essential conditions are met.

Each year, the American Library Association (ALA) is asked why the week is called “Banned Books Week” instead of “Challenged Books Week,” since the majority of the books featured during the week are not banned, but “merely” challenged. There are two reasons. One, ALA does not “own” the name Banned Books Week, but is just one of several cosponsors of BBW; therefore, ALA cannot change the name without all the cosponsors agreeing to a change. Two, none want to do so, primarily because a challenge is an attempt to ban or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. A successful challenge would result in materials being banned or restricted.

To check the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books from 1990-2000, click here.

Just Curious

Questions just keep popping up in our minds and most of the obscure questions remain unanswered. But not any longer, because now therez a site which can satisfy your thirst of curiousity. Website's URL couldn't have been more intutive -

This is what they say about themselves:

justcurio.us is an anonymous question and answer system, open to anyone, with one simple rule: to ask a question, you must first answer someone else's question. Question yields answer yields question. Strangers helping strangers.

The questions can be about anything — the best Beatles album, your saddest moment, your worst fear, your biggest regret, your fondest childhood memory, the meaning of life, whether you should break up with your girlfriend, the best crepe place in Paris, the best cure for loneliness. Anything at all. This is our chance to lean on each other, to look to a stranger for help, to discover what other people think.

justcurio.us is entirely confidential, allowing anyone to ask and answer questions with complete anonymity.

So, what's on your mind? Somebody may have an answer to it!

Arpit.

Happy Birthday

27th September, a celebrated day! and as Iam desperate to say the two coveted words today,
I use the occassion of Google's 7th Birthday as a pawn to do it..

H A P P Y ...B I R T H D A Y .Honey !

Google opened its doors in September 1998, with a mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. To say that they have been successful would be an understatement, because they have been a revolution ever since. Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up the first Google data center in Larry’s dorm room at Stanford. Today, along with web search based on Larry and Sergey’s original Backrub search engine, they offer specialized search for everything from satellite images to academic papers, local business info to your own computer. Google Talk, Gmail, Google Earth are few more things added recently in Google's kitty. For a glance over Google's History, click here.

On their 7th birthday, google claims to have expanded its web search index that is 1,000 times the size of its original index, which makes Google more than 3 times larger than any other search engine. Pretty impressive, eh? For more info on this click here.

That should wrap it up for Google's Birthday feature and my desperation to speak out Happy Birthday in public! So guyz, what say.. letz go and hit it out at Google.

Cheers.

Lazy Geeks

Geeks and that too Lazy Geeks!, Can't you smell something?
These people have this inbuilt knack of coming up with crazy ideas and what could be more ingenious, than having your desktop computer in bed. Sure you could use your laptop, but where’s the fun in that? Plus apparently you get better posture with a full-on keyboard and monitor layout.
Not Impressed? Check out the pics..

One more..

Cheers.

"Bangalored"

"I got Bangalored"

This is one of the most wierdest phrase that I have come across in a long time. Bangalore, the IT face of India has been making waves across the world with the outsourcing business but coining a term after it, is kinda outrageous. Bangalored is a verb which recently got added in the dictionary! A person is said to be bangalored if he lost his job because the work got outsourced to Bangalore or any other city in India. Lot of people in US got bangalored that it became an issue during the US presidential election. Thats exactly when this word was coined.

Bangalore is cited in particular because of its reputation in the USA as a high-tech city, the Indian equivalent of Silicon Valley, that has benefited significantly from such outsourcing. There are even some websites which are selling T-Shirts with the slogan “Don’t Get Bangalored” as a way of telling people about the issue.

A place name becoming a verb: strange and very whacky. As an Indian, Iam not sure whether this is an achievment, that we are able to shake US economy or its derogatory to have one of our cities used in such negative sense world wide. Any comments?

12th September 2005

This day will be remembered in cricketing history as one of the most memorable day for English fans as England regained the coveted Ashes after almost 18 years. Ashes 2005 has been an incredible series where arguably in the end, the best side won. But Australia did not give up the Ashes in a whimper, they fought with great ferocity in every match but just coudn't match up with England's determination. Even Shane Warne's stupendous effort of 40 wickets in the series couldn't prevent the unforeseen slide in Australia's fortune. Pietersen's knock on the final day, Flintoff's audacity, Warne's mesmerizing spell's and Ricky Ponting becoming the first Australian Captain to lose ashes in nearly two decades will remain the highlights of this pulsating series.
Many see this as end of Aussie era, and with two of the greatest bowlers of all time, Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne about to retire, wounds of Ashes 2005 might take a long time to heal!

Iam not an ardent England fan, but I simply love to see Aussies lose and their losing an Ashes is simply a great feeling and it was about time their aura of supermacy was broken. Great work by Vaughan and Co., its time to celebrate!

Cheers.

Thatz me!

It seems my search is over! I have finally discovered myself, Iam:

Are you one of those who are still baffled about your identity? Well help is on its way, just click here

Arpit.

Google Zeitgeist

I confess, I love google and every now and then you will find a post relating to Google. Here's another one, about one of their service that I discovered of late known as Google Zeitgeist.
Google Zeitgeist compiles all the tidbits of information relating to searches made on Google to unravel search patterns, trends and often surprises. Here, you can find the most obscure search patterns such as most popular brunette search for the month or the most popular cities across the world.

This is what Google say about this service:

Pulling together interesting search trends and patterns requires Google’s human and computing power together. Search statistics are automatically generated based on the millions of searches conducted on Google over a given period of time - weekly, monthly, and annually. With some help from humans, and a pigeon or two when they have time, these statistics and trends make their way from the depths of Google's hard drives to become the Google Zeitgeist report.

We should note that in compiling the Zeitgeist, no individual searcher's information is available or accessible to us. What you see here is a cumulative snapshot of interesting queries people are asking – some over time, some within country domains, and some on Google.com – that perhaps reveal a bit of the human condition. We appreciate the contribution all Google users make to these fascinating bits of information.

Check out Google Zeitgeist for some interesting and novel search patterns!

Arpit.

Blog Day 2005

Shit Man! I missed Blog Day yesterday, and being an ardent blogger, I can tell you, its not a great feeling. Thanks to Enginerd and Prasoon, I came to know that 3108 (August 31) is celebrated as Blog Day, (for all the dolts who can't make it out why, just look at the pic closely) .

After this interesting thing came to my knowledge, I decided to use good ol Google to find more about it, and herez something which one might find amusing about,

3108 BLOG DAY

BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. On that day Bloggers will recommend other blogs to their blog visitors.With the goal in mind, on this day every blogger will post a recommendation of 5 new blogs. In this way, all Blog web surfers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, previously unknown blogs.

We need BlogDay because:

1. Information Overflow! The more Blogs there are, the less time Bloggers spend on reading new weblogs. Because of the overload of information, you miss a lot of good Blogs and Bloggers.

2. Its Fun!

So, comrades as per Blogger Instruction about today's posting, here are some of my recommendations (don't loathe me, if you don't like them ;):

• Maeda's Simplicity: John Maeda is a prof. at MIT Media Labs
• Pencil Revolution: Philosophy behind pencils
  
• Flickr Blog: For all photo maniacs
• MoronsGospel: People you can't miss out on this one, one hopless romantic flaunts all his emotions for his inamorata!! (ya, ya this is my blog ;))

Cheers!

Blogger Responds

Spamming had just recently begun to bother bloggers with automated systems adding comments to blogs (i got some too, in my previous post) to advertise their product/website. But blogger has responded by enabling Word Verification option which can be found on the Settings | Comments tab of the blog. This will help prevent many unwated comments since it takes a human being to read the word and pass this step.

Word Verification may seem as an unnecessary hassle, but as of now, it seems the only viable solution to save yourself from spamming.

Way of future

Technology is scaling heights and it can find its use in the wierdest of ways. Here's one:

What does one do, when there's no mirror..

Yup.. webcamera to the rescue!!

You can laugh at it, but this is the way of future ;)

Arpit.

Intellisense

IntelliSense™ is a feature which was introduced and popularized by the Microsoft Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment. It involves a form of autocomplete for variable names, functions and member functions (for C++ classes). Using IntelliSense is a convenient way to access descriptions of functions, particularly their parameter lists. It allows significantly faster software development by easing the amount of keyboard input required. It also allows less reference to external documentation as documentation on many functions appears with the function name.

The feature works by accessing an automatically genereated database of classes and variable names. As the user begins typing a variable or function name (which the IDE determines by context), IntelliSense starts suggesting completions with a pop-up window containing a variable or function name. The user can either accept the suggestion by pressing or continue typing the name. Eventually IntelliSense will determine exactly which variable or function the user desires, given enough information. The feature also allows the user to select from a number of overloaded functions for object oriented programming. IntelliSense can also display a short description of a function in the pop-up window.

for example:

class A {
void sample();
void innovate();
}

class B extends A {
A obj = new A();
obj. //pop up menu comes up, which displays list of suggested methods,
hence user need not type it all

What promted me to write this post was that we use this feature every now and then but don't know that a term exists for it. 'Intellisense'.. interesting!

"Google Dance"

No two thoughts about it: Google is smart!
Instead of running aways from their enemies, they try to work with them. Strange it may sound, but this what happened recently at Googleplex, where they had their annual summer bash called "Google Dance". Behind the scenes, it was actually rendezvous between cunning internet entrepreneurs who constantly try to manipulate Google's search engine results for a competitive edge with Google's top notch engineers.

For the millions of websites without a well-known domain name, rankings can mean the difference between success or failure because Google's search engine drives so much of the internet's traffic. Being on the first page of Google's result is almost like gold.With so much at stake, low-ranked websites spend much time and money trying to elevate their standing, even if they must resort to deception. The tactics include "keyword stuffing" -- peppering a web page with phrases associated with a specific topic such as "laptop computers" in hopes of duping the software "spiders" that troll the internet to feed Google's growing search index. It's a risky strategy because Google and other search engines penalize websites that get caught gratuitously repeating the same word. In the worst cases, the offending websites are deleted from the index so they don't show up in search results at all.

Sometimes webmasters collude to populate their sites with a large number of incoming links from other sites. This approach makes a site appear more authoritative and popular than it really is and thus rise in rankings. Such dirty tricks pollute the search results with websites that have little to do with a user's request, frustrating consumers, diminishing Google's credibility and threatening to undermine the company's profits by driving users to its rivals.

Not surprisingly, Google works hard to thwart the mischief makers, sometimes branded as Black Hats because of their subterfuge. Engineers frequently tweak the algorithms that determine the rankings, sometimes causing websites perched at the top to fall a few notches or, worse, even plunge to the back pages of the results.

Hoping to ease the tensions with webmasters, Google hatched the idea of its "dance" party during an annual search engine convention held in Silicon Valley, just a few miles from Google's headquarters. The company invited some of the Black Hats, effectively welcoming the foxes into the hen house. "Google realized it was never going to get rid of these (Black Hats), so it decided it may as well work with them," Chris Winfield, a Google Dance party veteran who runs 10e20, a search engine marketing firm. "Until then, it always seemed like it was 'us against them.'"

Google knows it can't entirely avoid Black Hats, so its finding ways to subside their effect!

| Wired News

What is Eclipse?

Eclipse is an open platform for tool integration built by an open community of tool providers. Operating under an open source paradigm, with a common public license that provides royalty free source code and world wide redistribution rights, the eclipse platform provides tool developers with ultimate flexibility and control over their software technology.

Eclipse has formed an independent open eco-system around royalty-free technology and a universal platform for tools integration. Eclipse based tools give developers freedom of choice in a multi-language, multi-platform, multi-vendor environment. Eclipse provides a plug-in based framework that makes it easier to create, integrate and utilize software tools, saving time and money. By collaborating and exploiting core integration technology, tool producers can leverage platform reuse and concentrate on core competencies to create new development technology. The Eclipse Platform is written in the Java language and comes with extensive plug-in construction toolkits and examples.

The Eclipse Platform is a fresh start at an open integrated development environment (IDE) system with broad commercial participation. While classic tools like Emacs and others have supported the development needs of developers worldwide, most lacked the advanced features and convenience of GUI based IDEs, as well as an easily extensible nature, available in commercial tools. With over 1200 developers from 63 countries involved in the Eclipse open source community process and with more than 150 leading software tools vendors working with it, Eclipse stands a chance to change that entirely.

Eclipse is the basis of IBM's next generation of Websphere Studio products, which is a suite of tools that encompasses all of your development needs -- Web development, enterprise-scale application development, and development for wireless devices. The Studio tools run on top of WebSphere Studio Workbench, an open, extensible, tool integration platform that lets tool builders seamlessly integrate tools and application resources across the development lifecycle. The Workbench is the foundation for IBM's next generation of application development tools.

For more information on Eclipse, click here.

Sudoku

Sudoku which has taken the world by storm has become one of my latest infatuation. Sudoku is a simple game of logic, in which the objective is to complete the grid such that every row, every column, and every 3x3 block contains the digits from 1 to 9. Simple as it sounds, but comes in variety of difficulty levels and each puzzle is enticing in its own way and has something to offer which simply makes it an addiction!

Here's an interesting article about history of Sudoku:

The concept of Sudoku (Japanese: 数独, sūdoku) seems to begin with the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler who in 1783 invented Latin Squares - NxN grids which have all numbers from 1 to N appearing exactly once in each row and column. Because Euler used Greek letters, these grids were often called “Graeco-Latin Squares”. Sudoku puzzles as we know them were first published in the late 1970’s in Math Puzzles and Logic Problems magazine by Dell Magazines. The name given by Dell to these puzzles was Number Place, as they are still called by this company until today. Dell took Euler’s Latin Square concept and applied it to a 9x9 grid with the addition of nine 3x3 sub-grids, or boxes, each containing all numbers from 1 to 9.

So, the Sudoku concept was not invented in Japan as many people may believe, but the name Sudoku was. In 1984 Nikoli, Japan’s leading puzzle creating company, discovered Dell’s Number Place and decided to present them to their Japanese puzzle fans. The puzzles, which were first named Suuji Wa Dokushin Ni Kagiru, ("the numbers must be single" or "the numbers must occur only once") quickly became popular. In 1986, after some important improvements were added, mainly by making symmetrical patterns and reducing the number of given clues, Sudoku became one of the best selling puzzles in Japan. Realizing that the only problem with the Sudoku puzzles was their long name, Kaji Maki, the president of Nikoli abbreviated it to Sudoku - (Su = number, digit; Doku = single, unmarried). Today there are more than 600,000 copies of Sudoku magazines published solely in Japan every month.

At the end of 2004 Wayne Gould, a retired Hong Kong judge as well as a puzzle fan and a computer programmer, visited London trying to convince the editors of The Times to publish Sudoku puzzles. Gould, that had written a computer program which generates Sudoku puzzles of different difficulty levels, demanded no money for the puzzles. The Times decided to give it a try and on November 12, 2004 launched their first Sudoku puzzle. The publishing of Sudoku in the London Times was just the beginning of an enormous phenomenon which swiftly spread all over Britain and its affiliate countries of Australia and New Zealand. Three days later The Daily Mail began publishing Sudoku puzzles titled as "Codenumber". The Daily Telegraph of Sydney followed on 20 May 2005. By the end of May 2005 the puzzle was regularly published in many national newspapers in the UK, including The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Guardian, The Sun and The Daily Mirror. <>But that was not it. In July 2005 Channel 4 included a daily Sudoku game in their Teletext service and Sky One launched the world's largest Sudoku puzzle – a 275 foot (84 meter) square puzzle, carved in the side of a hill in Chipping Sodbury, near Bristol. The BBC Radio 4's Today began reading numbers aloud in the first Sudoku radio version. Famous British celebrities as Big Brother's Jade Goody and Carol Vorderman, that her book How to do Sudoku is the best-selling book in the country, have testified to its benefits as a mental workout. Even the Teachers magazine which is backed by the government recommended Sudoku as brain exercise in classrooms and suggestions have been made that Sudoku solving is capable of slowing the progression of brain disorder conditions such as Alzheimer's.In April 2005 Sudoku completed a full circle and arrived back to Manhattan as a regular feature in the New York Post. On Monday, July 11, the Sudoku craze spread to other parts of the USA when both The Daily News and USA Today launched Sudoku puzzles on the same day. In both cases the Sudoku puzzles were instead of traditional crosswords and bridge columns.

Today there are Sudoku clubs, chat rooms, strategy books, videos, mobile phone games, card games, competitions and even a Sudoku game show. Sudoku has also sprung up in newspapers all over the world and is commonly described in the world media as "the Rubik's cube of the 21st century" and as the "fastest growing puzzle in the world".

For some Sudoku strategies, click here.

Arpit.

Open GL

OpenGL is the premier environment for developing portable, interactive 2D and 3D graphics applications. Since its introduction in 1992, OpenGL has become the industry's most widely used and supported 2D and 3D graphics application programming interface (API), bringing thousands of applications to a wide variety of computer platforms. OpenGL fosters innovation and speeds application development by incorporating a broad set of rendering, texture mapping, special effects, and other powerful visualization functions. Developers can leverage the power of OpenGL across all popular desktop and workstation platforms, ensuring wide application deployment.

Different areas where the aforesaid capabilities are used include markets such as broadcasting, CAD/CAM/CAE, entertainment, medical imaging, and virtual reality to produce and display incredibly compelling 2D and 3D graphics.

Some of the developer driven advantages are:

• Industry standard
  An independent consortium, the OpenGL Architecture Review Board, guides the OpenGL specification. With broad industry support, OpenGL is the only truly open, vendor-neutral, multiplatform graphics standard.

• Stable
  OpenGL implementations have been available for more than seven years on a wide variety of platforms. Additions to the specification are well controlled, and proposed updates are announced in time for developers to adopt changes. Backward compatibility requirements ensure that existing applications do not become obsolete.

• Reliable and portable
  All OpenGL applications produce consistent visual display results on any OpenGL API-compliant hardware, regardless of operating system or windowing system.

• Evolving
  Because of its thorough and forward-looking design, OpenGL allows new hardware innovations to be accessible through the API via the OpenGL extension mechanism. In this way, innovations appear in the API in a timely fashion, letting application developers and hardware vendors incorporate new features into their normal product release cycles.

• Scalable
  OpenGL API-based applications can run on systems ranging from consumer electronics to PCs, workstations, and supercomputers. As a result, applications can scale to any class of machine that the developer chooses to target.

• Easy to use
  OpenGL is well structured with an intuitive design and logical commands. Efficient OpenGL routines typically result in applications with fewer lines of code than those that make up programs generated using other graphics libraries or packages. In addition, OpenGL drivers encapsulate information about the underlying hardware, freeing the application developer from having to design for specific hardware features.

OpenGL runs on every major operating system including Mac OS, OS/2, UNIX, Windows 95/98, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Linux, OPENStep, and BeOS; it also works with every major windowing system, including Win32, MacOS, Presentation Manager, and X-Window System. OpenGL is callable from Ada, C, C++, Fortran, Python, Perl and Java and offers complete independence from network protocols and topologies.

For more details on Open GL, click here

Don't confuse web design with sex

Interesting headline.. eh? Well it was this very headline which prompted me to go through the content of the article written by Vincent Flander, Usability Guru. After completing the article, I kind of related to the analogy and soon realized the power of this headline which may seem absurd on first look. Anyone minutely interested in web design MUST go through this article and will soon realize how we ourselves make life difficult for users.

• Don't confuse web design with sex

Sex is the one thing everybody understands -- to a certain extent -- and that makes it easier to make analogies. I've tried many ways to convey a simple message and sometimes I feel the message is not getting through. Maybe a sexual analogy will work. This topic does not revolve around personal sites or other sites that aren't accountable -- movie sites, band sites, art sites, web logs, etc. I talk about sites where the focus is making money or disseminating information. It's my opinion that web designers are confusing the web world with the real world. In the real world, foreplay is mandatory. You have to set the mood, you have to be gentle, you have to entice. Fine. But in the world of the web there's no place for foreplay. It's not necessary. It gets in the way. To put it bluntly, the web is "Wham. Bam. Thank you Ma'am." People don't need to be enticed or put in the mood when they visit your site. They're there for a particular reason and the sooner you give them what they came looking for, the better. They don't need Splash pages, Flash pages, Mystery Meat Navigation, or whatever silliness you think will put them "in the mood." They want what they want NOW. "Give me your information. Sell me your product. Thank you, ma'am." (There is an exception to this "rule." Certain non-profit organizations can effectively use Splash pages to get potential donors "in the mood."

One line from a Pointer Sisters (I believe) song went something like "I want a man with the slow hands." Can you imagine the following line about a web site -- "I want a page with the slow load"? Not really because web design is about giving people what they want as quickly as possible in a way that they'll buy your product, your service, or contribute to your cause. (Some non-profits may be an exception -- some mood setting may be necessary. You should know the difference.)
Just as we've all been told not to confuse love with sex, we should also remember not to confuse web design with sex. Web design is about making money for the designer and, more importantly, the client.

This article is also available here.

-Arpit-

Efficacy and Need for User Interface Design

Many technological innovations rely upon User Interface Design to elevate theirtechnical complexity to a usable product. Technology alone may not win useracceptance and subsequent marketability. The User Experience, or how the userexperiences the end product, is the key to acceptance. And that is where UserInterface Design enters the design process. While product engineers focus on thetechnology, usability specialists focus on the user interface. For greatest efficiency andcost effectiveness, this working relationship should be maintained from the start of aproject to its rollout.User Interface Design increases the intuitiveness, efficiency, and comfort level with aproduct, which translates into product acceptance and use. One requires both goodtechnology and usability for a successful product launch. Primarily, userinterface design revolves around the ideas of Information Architecture and Usability Study. Their brief are described below:

• Information Architecture
  

Information Architecture is a science and an approach towards designing clear, understandable communications by giving care to structure, context, and presentationof data and information. The goal of information architecture is to enable users to find the information they are seeking in a clear manner which is done by organizing theinformation for efficient navigation, layout and search functionality. Well-planned architecture is a great boon both for consumers and the producers. Accessing a sitefor the first time, consumers can quickly understand it effortlessly. They can quicklyfind the information they need, thereby reducing time wasted on both finding information and not finding information. Producers of web-sites also benefit becausethey know where to place the new content without disrupting the existing content andsite structure. Information Architecture is not about graphic design or programming or userexperience testing. Rather it is a mediator solution which helps create road-map for thedevelopment of an application.The job of an information architect can beformulated as a person, who: • Determines what content and functionality the site will contain • Specifies how users will find information in the site by defining its organization,navigation, labeling, and searching systems • Maps out how the site will accommodate change and growth over time.

• Usability Study

Usability is a multidimensional attribute that relates to the impact a product has on itsend-users. In general it refers to the effectiveness and the efficiency with which acustomer can do their tasks with the product, and their overall satisfaction with thatprocess. Usability is a key design and marketing concept meaning the extent to whicha product is safe, comfortable, effective, and efficient. Usability refers to the ease withwhich a User Interface can be used by its intended audience to achieve defined goals. It incorporates number of factors such as design, functionality, structure, information architecture, and more. Usability can be measured objectively via performance errorsand productivity, and subjectively via user preferences and interface characteristics.Web design features that affect usability include navigation design and content layout.Remarkable diversity of human abilities, backgrounds, motivations, personalities, cultures and work styles are the challenges faced by interface designers.To develop high quality, there are three keywords that the crossdisciplinary interface development team needs to keep in mind, which are: Usability, Applicability and Utility. By Usability, we imply factors such as speed of learning, rateof errors by users, retention over time, subjective satisfaction of the user. ByApplicability, we mean that the interface is accepted and appreciated with peoplecoming from wide culturally diverse groups, from different age groups, possessing different cognitive and perceptual abilities, having different personality styles. By Utility,we mean that the interface should be useful and should satisfy the need of the usersthat the interface is intended for. This is one measure, which is most important to gain customer satisfaction and appreciation. Jakob Nielsen, usability guru has proposed 10 set of heuristics to evaluate websites and they are globally accepted. Click here to go through them.

Thus, as evident Interface Design is a highly specialized and creative field encompassing many areas of study , which at times does get driven by sheer common sense.

-Arpit-

Webby Awards

Though Iam little late in posting about Webby Awards, but these are one awards which really deserve a post.

Webby Awards

The leading international award honoring excellence in Web design, creativity, usability and functionality.Established in 1996, the Webby Awards is presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 500-member body of leading web experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries and creative celebrities.

This year on May 3rd this academy unveiled their choices for Webby Winners, and netizens from around the world cast more than two-hundred thousand votes to determine Webby People's Voice Winners.
Here are links to few which simpy have to be visited:

1. Best Navigation/Structure Website: 10X10 news site
2. Best Personal WebSite: Rtm86.com
3. Best Games Site: Metamorphical.net
4. Uncategorized: Don't Click It
   

For more Webby Awards, click here

Happy Surfing!!

-Arpit-