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!