User Experience Design at MindTree

"Where is the train heading to?"

2011-11-07T14:22:00.000+05:30

User Experience: Petrol Pump

2011-09-09T16:18:00.001+05:30

Objective: How to enhance the user experience at a Petrol Pump?

The Story:

I recently came across this problem statement, that was given to the manager of a Petrol Pump. I imagined myself to be that manager, and thought, thought hard! Then I browsed the internet to have a look at the variety of petrol pumps that we usually come across.

I also thought about some of the characteristics of a petrol pump :

Petrol is more of a commodity, with prices differing only between states. Some companies tried to create Premium products but I have seen commoditization even on those premium products. So, a person is largely indifferent on where the petrol is getting filled from!

There might be exceptions: Example: People believe petrol available on highways might be impure and ruin their engines.

Personnel at a petrol pump understand numbers, so one needs to indicate what and how much is required. And since, petrol or diesel doesn't usually have local names, language barriers are low.
Services usually offered at a petrol pump: Petrol filling (obviously!), Air Check and Pollution check
Petrol pumps are businesses of scale just like hyper markets.
Service design -

How many vehicles can fit in at a time?
Maximum capacity
How will vehicles get in?
How will vehicles get out?

Now, my thoughts went on to how can one enhance the user experience given such characteristics of a service. And an important point to note is that, "Enhancement of User experience is not an end goal, it is a continuous process. One can add some components in a service that may seem to achieve the goal, but it will be momentary."

Without any proof, I dare to show how a user experience curve might look like, something like this decay curve over time!

Hence, my point here is not to build the perfect service, rather build relationships over time; relationships between employees and customers, that give the necessary feedback into the system to enhance further. Here we go with my observations on how some petrol pumps do that:

As soon as we enter some petrol pumps a person guides us to the shortest line, or stops us or the line to get shorter. He also indicates the approximate time required to wait. In India, usually it is 2 minutes!
We also observe arrows to indicate the manner in which our vehicles should enter the filling areas and out of it.
A friendly smile when we stop the car is always welcome!
While, our vehicles are getting their food, someone comes over to ask "Sir ji! Shall I clean your windshield?" So, by the time the refilling id done, your windshield gets a makeover!
If you are paying by card, there is an apprehension as the cashier takes the card along inside a queer building. To change all that some petrol pumps are now equipped with mobile card swipes for Visa to American Express! (American Express, although an express, is the least accepted card in India, according to my observations! That's why it needed special mention :) )
I would love if someone would be able to check the tire pressure as well while I am filling. This trend is yet to catch up due to some unknown reasons. But this would be really useful!
Extra lubricants, and oils within a hands reach is always better at the petrol filling station. Not many petrol pumps do that, hence causing that unnecessary delay in delivery the service
Petrol pumps are also the best places for driving directions (till the days when we will each get a GPS!) So, an intelligent, direction-informed attendant is a good resource at any petrol pump.
I think the idea of a supermart at a petrol pump has still not picked up in India. But, I have surely seen the potential for a small vendor selling ready snacks like chips, tetra pack of juices, cans of cold drinks etc.
And finally, if the person filling up my car gives that "I know you!" smile and the greeting then it makes us feel special! We feel like sharing our car troubles with him. We also give the person tips at times! And, as we embark on our journey for user experience, this is the just beginning.... ...

Jumping to Solutions

2011-09-02T13:22:00.000+05:30

What do you think is the biggest challenge in an Ideationexercise?

Why do you think, most of the solutions fail?

Why does even research does not bring out all the issues?

How can you hold a brainstorming session to build a solutionmore fruitful and effective?

As we deal with these barriers and many more, we realizethat there is a key to at least put ourselves on the right track. The key isobviously driven by the capability of the people working on the problem. But,as long as a conscious effort is made to remember the key, we would not loseour focus.

And, no we are not going to suggest that building a clearobjective is the key. Although, we do not deny the importance of building aclear objective, but we are going to delve one level deeper. And we are goingto explain it with the help of some examples.

So, what is this key? The key is to understand theunderlying systems, components, players and influencers before jumping on tosolutions. In other words, it is necessary to first understand what the problemis.

Right Approach

Wrong Approach

Now, let’s go through some examples:

Example 1:

One of the big problems in South Africa that people weretrying to tackle was human-elephant conflict. Elephants used to encroach onfarmland and destroy livelihoods. In response, some farmers resorted topoisoning or shooting elephants.

Environment conservationists jumped to solutions for solvingthis problem. All kinds of modern technology solutions were proposed, and manytrialled: Electric fences, RFID tagging, sensors and live-GSM-tracking amongthem. Most of the solutions failed since they were not replicable, scalable,and/or affordable.

Solution: Elephants run away when they encounter bees.According to this BBCarticle, early research in Kenya indicates hives can be a very effectivebarrier, so much so that 97% of attempted elephant raids were aborted. Wheresatellites, RFID tags and mobile phones failed, humble honey bees proved to bethe answer.

Also note how honey bees also proved to be an alternatesource of income!

Example 2:

Wimbledon had an interesting battle on and off the courts:against the pigeons. Each summer, as tennis players battle it out on the lawncourts, the authorities used to battle and stop pigeons from interfering with theplay. Authorities armored themselves with all sorts of modern technology thatwas available: lasers and radio controlled aircraft to gas guns and ultrasoundemitters. Now, we can understand what the courts would have looked like withall equipments, like a battleground?

Solution: Now, if we look from a pigeon’s perspective, allthese high tech equipment might be dangerous, but nothing is a match to a birdof prey! Hence, Wimbledon’s answer doesn’t involve anything more high-tech thana bird of prey! A few laps by Rufus, the hawk, around the tennis courts areenough to scare the hardiest of pigeons away! (Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13939805)

In India, we solve a similar problem of monkeys using langursto scare them off!

Example 3:

One very big cosmetics company in Japan received a complaintthat a consumer had bought a soap box that was empty. Management of the companyimmediately traced the problem to the assembly line that conveyed all thepackaged boxes of soap to the delivery department. For some reason, one soapbox went through the assembly line empty.

Management asked its engineers to solve the problem. Theengineers worked hard on the first solution that came to mind, using X-raytechnology. They devised an X-ray machine with high-resolution monitors. Twoworkers were deployed full-time to monitor all the soap boxes that passedthrough the line to make sure they were not empty. They managed to solve theproblem but it was an expensive solution.

Solution: The solution was taken to the assembly line andthe installation was started. Out of curiosity, one of the workers asked aboutthe installation. On hearing the whole story, he told his engineering managerthat the solution was much easier – install a fan- it will blow away all theempty boxes and the assembly line will deliver only full, heavier packages!

Conclusion: As our world is becoming more complex, our problemsare becoming even worse! We have numerous methodologies to solve these complexproblems, but we observe, increasingly that these solutions are not s effectiveor efficient as we would have liked them to be! The reason, which we also callthe “key”, to get our final solution right to a greater extent is not to jumponto solutions. Some of the examples here might help us in realizing ourshortcomings, hence, improving our methodologies and thinking!

Usages of iPAD

2011-08-18T10:52:00.032+05:30

So we have new iPAD, iPAD 2, iPAD 2 3G! Phew! That’s a lot!!! But what do we do with this new luxury iitem? It is a gadget that can replace a number of other products. I am sure there must be some really wonderful usage of the iPAD. Here is a compilation of some iPad usages from internet and own experiences.

1. Surf the Internet
iPad is the best way to experience the web. View whole pages in portrait or if you may like it, in landscape on the large Multi-Touch screen. And let your fingers do the surfing. You can sync your bookmarks from your Mac or PC, and add even more right from your iPad. Besides, MobileMe keeps your Safari bookmarks in sync on your iPad, iPhone, Mac, and PC - wirelessly and automatically. So no matter where you go, you'll always have the most up-to-date information at hand.

2. Games

t's great for playing simple little games. There are many free gaming applications for the iPad already. If you're willing to pay for games, then there are many to choose from, many are made specifically for iPAD.

3. E-mail
It's ideal for checking e-mail and sending short e-mails, especially when you're on the go. There's nothing like the Mail app on iPad. With a split-screen view and expansive onscreen keyboard, it lets you see and touch your email in ways you never could before.

4. E-reader
With the new iPad. you can access all of the books on Amazon, just like a Kindle, but the display is much bigger. You can view your book in portrait or landscape, and the way the pages flip is awesome - you flip it with your finger and it looks just like a real book.

5. Photo storage and viewing
The iPad is great for storing and viewing your photos because of the large display and the way that you can flip easily from one photo to the next, and jump between folders with ease.

6. Music
The big, beautiful iPad display lets you browse your music collection by song, artist, album, genre, or composer with the touch of a finger. See your music as full-size album art. Flip through all your albums and tap to choose what you want to hear. iPad makes music look as good as it sounds.

7. Recipe book
It's great to have in the kitchen with you when you need to follow a recipe since it takes up much less space than a laptop. There are many great recipe websites, plus there are many free apps related to recipes and cooking.

8. Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) i.e. Skype

The iPad has a speaker and built-in microphone so it's ideal for making phone calls over the Internet, and watching the video as well in iPAD 2! Tried this recently and absolutely loved the experience.

9. Movies
Great for using on airplanes or even at the gym, the iPad has a big screen and is great for watching films, especially when compared with a cell phone or an iPod.

10. Weather & News
Apart from e-mail and Internet, this is probably what the iPad is most used for at our house. There are plenty of great apps for quick news and weather reports at your fingertips, many of which you can customize to your own interests.

Do you have more ideas/ usages? Go on…add here.

Experiences at an Airport

2011-07-18T16:28:00.001+05:30

Airport is a place, where we are bound to come early for Check In and other formalities. As I reached Bangalore Airport and Delhi Airport 2 hours earlier to the scheduled departure, I wandered around and wondered.......

Some of my observations:

People go around looking for something new and exciting around the airport
A BMW kiosk was the center of attention. The Kiosk displayed BMW cars and at the bottom gave information about the airport.
Many people were also going through the display of clothes by many Fashion retail houses like Tommy, DKNY etc. Interestingly I could not find even a single person buying or even trying out the clothes. But, some people were buying small accessories, chocolates, sweets and most of the people bought eatables and food items.
Regarding food items, I have observed that people are increasingly buying packaged food to be consumed on flight. This is becoming a phenomenon after low cost airlines have become a rage. These airlines do not provide "free" food on flight, so, I believe people find a wider variety and better deal on airports rather than on flights.
Foot Massage chairs are usually kept for demonstration in malls and were available here at airports too. Noticeably, only a few use the chairs available at malls but at the airport, there was a queue to have a demonstration for the same.
As soon as the newspapers came in, everyone jumped on them. Almost everyone picked up every newspaper daily possible. As I watched a couple of people, they browsed through the spicy parts of the newspapers and then kept them aside. Only a few went on to read some news articles in details. All such papers went into either waste baskets or got collected by an airport staff (I think to be sold in junkyard).A few people also saved the newspapers for the journey.
When we got onto the flight, just a 2.5 hours journey, the observations were even more interesting.

Most people fiddle around with every object around them

The flight magazine
The safety manual --> Some keep it back as soon as they pick it up, dejectedly, but others pick it back to read.

People cannot make any calls using their mobile phones on flights. But, they keep playing with the device, just in case it would come alive and get them some entertainment (engagement)
Alas, some people start small talk with their neighbors over silly things such as: how rude was the airhostess, weather, India etc.

When we touch down, then somewhere in the back of our minds is there a tiny doubt over our luggage: Will we get it back? When will it come? Is it broken?
Public transport and public transport information from the Airports is still not all that great, although we get some options: Buses, Taxis, Metro, Shared Taxi, Autos, Shared Autos; but the challenge is in identifying what suits my needs best and how to know about it.

I believe, Airports provide a lot of opportunities, and the opportunities are even more attractive because of one major reason:
"People are actively seeking for solutions!"

Do share what other opportunities come to your mind, or what other observations do you make while in an Airport?

Signage: A True Global Language

2011-07-15T14:45:00.012+05:30

Walking on the streets of Phuket, unbelievably thirsty, of all the Andaman Sea water around me, I wanted a fresh water tap/ bottle and I spot a familiar water tap sign. What a relief!!! A foreign country, an unknown place, language differences and a sign that is literally water to thirsty!

Signage is any visual graphics created to display information to a particular audience. It is a crisp information display that can be globally understood. The most common places for display are Roads, Hospitals, Public Places, and Airport. Signages are designed with smart appropriate usage of following elements:

Shape: The various needs lead to range of shape. Rectangular -the most commonly used shape appropriate to display information. There can be a picture and text to convey the message within the shape. Triangle, Square, Hexagonal, Circle, Oval, Block arrow are other shapes used across the world.

Color: The basics of color psychology using red to show stop, danger; yellow for Alert; green- positive sign to give permission. Various background colors example white, yellow, and black to enhance the graphics, text used in the sign.

Fig 1: Shapes and colors for signages

Pictures/Graphics/Pictograms: A sketch, outline or picture of known objects, Graphics of relative things and beings. Adding graphics to signage’s helps in relating the sign.

Text: Alphabets, alphanumeric characters are used in signages. The usage of variety of font types, font size, Font colors. The text can be country, language specific.

Fig 2: example showing signage’s by combination of the elements

These elements can be used together in various permutation and combination for a Signage Design.

There are different types of signage’s to serve variety of purpose. A signage can be to direct the person to the right information, guidance, Branding. Based on the purpose it serves, broadly signages can be:

Street/Traffic Sign: Seen in every part of the world. Used to identify traffic roads, traffic rules, types of roads.

Fig 3: Traffic Signs

Banner Sign: Banner is a flag or other piece of cloth bearing a symbol, logo, slogan or other message. Banners are used mostly for advertisement, Marketing.

Commercial,Public Places signage: These are pictorial or brief text signages used in various commercial, public places. These signage’s help to identify the required information.

Fig: 4 Signage’s example at Public Places

The Usage of the signage’s helps in finding the way, expanding the information reach beyond language and cultural barriers.

Dissecting Discipline of Designing Experiences

2011-07-07T22:00:00.000+05:30

Often I come across different viewpoints on Experience Design discipline about what it is and what exactly experience designers do. The executioner’s (in software business) school of thought is that experience design is the practice of designing technology products and services (each of which is a human experience) based on the consideration of an individual's or a group's needs, tasks, desires, beliefs, knowledge, skills, experiences, and perceptions. Thus, it results into achieving certain user goals and leads to a successful system acceptance by users.

The other school of thought is more at an abstract level that defines experience design as a discipline of designing mental journeys that leaves the customer with memories of having performed something special, meaningful, engaging, with sense of achievement or just fun and entertainment.

Like any other discipline, I think experience design can also be understood as an organized production system that is about creating output in the form of desired experiences using available inputs such as knowledge and ideas, and finally using resources in the form of design processes and skills.

Let’s take an example of thematic restaurants. Today, food is more of an experience rather than a necessity, as only a minor part of the average income (approximately 10 per cent) is spent on food.

Dining is a combined body and mind (sensory) experience and has aspects of culture and society. The body tastes, smells, sees, hears, feels and digests the food. The mind reads the food consciously and unconsciously in the form of activated emotions and memories.

Theme restaurants are cautiously designed to deliver customer experiences by influencing customer’s state of mind with the right ambiance, environment, lighting, music/live performance, and personal service on top of the food served to stimulate emotions like happiness and so on. A great deal of skills and processes are required to accomplish delivery of such desired experiences in the restaurant business.

Another example could be watching theater, which is another form of immersive experience thoughtfully crafted for audience. The stage performances are scripted around a theme to entertain and educate audience (selective sometimes) by stimulating emotions such as anger, happiness, surprise, confusion, and more.

The two examples mentioned above can help us dissect different aspects of organized experience delivery system.

Core Activity
The core activity is what a customer wants to accomplish as a task or an activity. For example, watching a play in a theater or eating in a restaurant.

The Concept (or the ‘Feel’)
The core concept is the theme that the customer admires and what the product stands for. For example, a concept “Happiness is in small moments of life and must be shared” is the theme of Unilever ice cream brand and is well translated into the design of ice cream packaging and ice cream vending machine designs where in a customer is delivered ice cream when he/she smiles into the face recognition system. See demo

Peripheral Experience
Peripherals are supporting experiences (part of the overall customer experience) to which a customer initially pays extra emphasis. For example, the way seating is arranged, welcoming gesture at the entry, cleanliness, and so on.

Core Experience
Core experiences are activities in which a customer gets involved physically and mentally. For example, taste of the food, dialog delivery of an actor, sound and music and so on. Developing core experience is a skilled job and the output is actively consumed by customers. However, core experience cannot be appreciated without a good theme.

Support Services
Support services are materials such as cutlery, menu, and order delivery that are used to accomplish the core activity.

Such a dissection would help in understanding design and delivery of experiences. In my next blog I will make an attempt to explore how a similar approach can be applied in design for software applications.

How to Design sized web content for Mobile web

2011-07-07T11:39:00.013+05:30

Previous post highlighted some of the guidelines that will help, while designing for mobile web.
But if we specifically talk about iOS, then it has capability of displaying content designed for desktop. So same content can be used across devices.

iOS displays existing web content in two ways, it can display the web content on the screen resolution of the device or it can render the page at the actual size of the page and then "zoom out" to fit the page on the screen of the device. This virtual screen is called "Viewport"

What is Viewport?

It can be defined as the rectangular area ( screen) where the content is displayed.

Image below displays the "Desktop Viewport" and "Viewport on iOS"

For most of the devices the screen resolution and the display size are equal to the viewport. This thing is applicable in case of desktop , laptops etc, but in the case of mobile it is different. Many pages on web, wont render well on all phones, at their screen resolution. In order to render all the pages well, mobile phone render pages on the virtual resolution and then scale them down to fit on the screen of the device.
For example: In iOS the device screen width is 320 pixels and the viewport size width can be 980 pixels, so in this case, the webpage with 980 px width, will fit perfect on the screen.

Viewport Meta Tags

Safari on iOS displays almost all the pages well, that are designed for desktop. If this doesnt work then you need to change the settings by configuring the viewport. Configuring the Viewport is easy, just add a line of HTML to your webpage. It is basically done through viewport meta tags. Typically viewport meta tag is used to set the width and initial scale of the viewport to improve the presentation of the webpage. For example : if the width of your webpage is less than 980 px, then you should set the width of the viewport to match the width of your webpage.

"Viewport meta tags are basically used to configure the width and the scale of the viewport"

If your webpage is narrower than the default width, then set the width of your viewport to the width of the webpage, as displayed in the image below:

Viewport settings for Web Applications

If you are designing web application specifically for iOS, then the recommended size of your webpage should be the size of the iOS. Apple recommends that set the width as “device-width” so that the scale is 1.0 in the portrait orientation and it doesn't change when the device is in landscape orientation.

Configuring the viewport helps resizing the web content for the device. But it will not be able to give a good user experience every time, because in some cases text will not be readable, user has to zoom in, zoom out , scroll a lot, in order to read the content, reach the targeted link etc.

Content Design guidelines for Mobile web

2011-07-06T12:02:00.024+05:30

While creating a website the first thing that a designer decides is the appropriate dimensions for it . But when it comes to mobile, the resolution and dimensions are not fixed. They are changing very rapidly, also the lifespan of mobile devices are much shorter. The constant release of new mobile devices also adds to mobile device resolutions. So this wide variety of resolution, makes it difficult for designer to select an appropriate dimension to work on.

Figure1: This is a very limited list and not complete. It is just to give an idea about the resolutions.

To answer this problem, we need to create layouts for specific collection of devices. These layouts changes depending upon the resolution and orientation of a device, in order to enhance the experience on mobile.The main reason of this mobile resolution specific experience is the “one web” approach to the web design.

…One Web means making, as far as is reasonable, the same information and services
available to users irrespective of the device they are using. However, it does not mean
that exactly the same information is available in exactly the same representation across
all devices. The context of mobile use, device capability variations, bandwidth issues, and
mobile network capabilities all affect the representation. Furthermore, some services and
information are more suitable for and targeted at particular user contexts…

Guidelines for Designing for Mobile web

Many of these guidelines will improve the reliability, performance, look and user experience of your webpage, on all mobile platforms.

Simple
Users on mobile, quickly want to get the desired information. So mobile site should be simple than the standard site. Standard site is already simple, simplify it further more, to optimize it for mobile. This may include re doing the menus, removing images, breaking texts at certain places etc. You need to simplify the site from design and functionality perspective. Make sure that everything presented on the site should be simple, readable and useful.

Example

Lightweight
Use lightweight graphics for mobile site. Even it is good to use a simple, separate mobile theme for mobile site. Mobile theme means you can actually consider how user are using your site and then optimize it for mobile accordingly.

Example

Use Columns and Blocks
Use columns and blocks to layout your webpage like many online newspapers. If the content on a webpage, cover the full width with content, then it generally becomes difficult to read. Columns and blocks breaks the webpage into parts, thus making it easier to read and also allows user to double tap on objects on page.

Example

Limit Page Length
Include as much content from your actual site as practically possible. But include that too a limit. Don't make the user to scroll too long , to view the complete page. In a touchscreen phone its still easier to view a longer page, but also think about a user with a keypad based phone. Break the content into parts, use pagination etc to avoid long scrolling.

Don't use pop ups or open new window
Do not use pop ups or open new windows, while browsing a website on mobile. As it can infer between the browsing experience.

Don't rely on flash or java script
Not all phones support flash or java script. And if some of the phones support, then it is not sure that its the latest version. Make sure that content on your mobile site is plain HTML/CSS, otherwise large content of your site will be on risk, if users will not be able to access it.

Limit scrolling to one direction
It is really annoying when user has to scroll in multiple directions, while browsing through a site. And this become worse, if user has to browse that over a mobile phone. Limit your browsing to one direction (vertical) to give a better experience to the user.

Example

Link to the Standard site
Whatever platform users might be using, they might want to see the standard site, as nowadays many smartphones, i phones are capable of presenting the desktop site as it is. Always give a link to the main site, it can be link it the footer. It should also allow the user to go back to the mobile version from the main site without using back button.

Example

Size and Sequence
Plan the proper sequence of the content on your site, depending upon the importance of the content, buttons, navigation links etc. Interface should also be designed keeping in mind the touchscreen interface, where buttons, click able links should be bigger.

Example

References: noupe.com , UX booth, cyberdesigz.com

Design Thinking

2011-06-26T00:19:00.006+05:30

We had the pleasure to attend a session on "Design Thinking – Looking beyond the obvious and crafting a vision for the future" by Prof. Ulrich Weinberg, who is the Head of “School of Design Thinking” at Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, Germany since 2007.

First, I will note down some key points from his session on Design Thinking and then I will put in my opinions & thoughts.

Key points from the session:


Sustainable Innovation

For a sustainable innovation the process has to start with human needs. When the human needs are understood, then one has to understand how technology can support those human needs. And finally, one has to build the business case.
Key requirement of Design Thinking is a multi-disciplinary team. This team has to work on an iterative process in an appropriate environment. The appropriate environment for design thinking is a variable space as will be discussed subsequently.
Multi-disciplinary team is very important and every individual has to understand and rely on the power of team.
Our education systems have corrupted us in thinking only about ourselves. It has made us increasingly individualistic. But, for Design Thinking to succeed we have to think of our collective success rather than individual achievements.

Iterative Process

In the iterative process, it is necessary that no one thinks about the solution in the first 3 steps. The first 3 steps are to:

Understand the problem
Observe the users and the problems in depth
Build a point of view about the users and the problems

Only, after building a point of view should the team move on to Ideation phase that is like a brainstorming session. The objective is to come out with as many solutions possible. "One has to build quantity before quality."
Iteration of the whole process is important for the success. Usually, the first prototype is only 60-70% successful after testing. And every iteration refines the solution further.
Many team members of the mulit-disciplinary team come from a non-creative backgrounds. Everyone has to understand that creativity is in-built in everyone. What is important is to "reactivate the skills" and bring back "creativity from kindergarten"

This is also known as building up of Creative Confidence.

"Failing early and often" is a lesson not just for the failing student but for the team and other observants as well.
How to create a flexible working environment?

Lots of white boards should be placed. Enough for everyone to play with.
Movable furniture
Standing positions for team members has been found to be better suited for such process. It was observed that individuals were more active participants when standing compared to sitting.
Information environment - An environment where information flow is very easy.

What sort of individuals are best suited for Design Thinking process?

T shaped people: Individuals who are good in the filed they are in, but are equally capable of appreciating and understanding other fields and people from other domains.

How has digital media helped?

Design Thinking would not have been possible without the advent of Digital Media. Collecting ideas very rapidly has been possible using this media.

My thoughts & opinions:

Building multi-disciplinary teams is very important for Design Thinking. But, for most of the businesses this is the hardest part. All said and done, bringing together such a team would be hard for smaller businesses or in fact for anyone except some academic institutions.
Multi-disciplinary team formulation does not take care of cultural sensitivities.

How can one solve a problem in India sitting in other parts of the world, by building a team of people who have never been to or lived in India?

Sustainable innovation also leaves aside the culture and society.

A solution may be good for user needs, technologically feasible and with a good business case, but society may see it as a threat or the solution may be culturally unacceptable. So, it should be (User Needs + Cultural impact + Societal Values)

Physical environment seems to be a key component of the whole process. With decreasing interactions in real world and increased interactions in virtual world, it is not clear how to build an appropriate environment in virtual world.

In one of our projects where we are applying Design Thinking, half the team members sit in US and half are in India. It is a real challenge to create a suitable environment on digital world.

Content Publishers Going ‘Tabletized’

2011-06-15T12:12:00.004+05:30

Newspapers were the first to realize the power of the Web to communicate instantly with their readers. Now being mobile-enabled has become increasingly important for them to stay relevant today. And as if it wasn’t enough of a problem to choose the right platform (Android, iOS), device capability, or to choose between mobile Web and native application, things have become more complicated with penetration of tablet devices (though there's no competition to iPad yet).

Tablet devices will become the biggest point of influence as to how users will interact and consume digital content. Companies such as BBC, FLUD, Wired, and many more already have their iPad native application available on Apple 'sApp store. CNN, Reuters, ESPN, SPIN.com, and NYTimes.com have made themselves aligned to iPad Web browsing experience.

However, the strategic choices will become easier for digital content publishers if they try to understand how different stakeholders of the publishing industry will deal with content in future.

Native Experience of Information

The first advantage of creating a native application for iPad is the richness of experience the app provides. Designers seem to be designing apps more as amalgamations of games and info-graphic interfaces and less as task-driven interfaces. Native applications can make good use of device capabilities such as camera, accelerometer, gyroscope, voice and motion sensor, and GPS and add to the overall experience of the application which is difficult to achieve on browser-based app designs. While some amount of offline browsing and location aware services are possible using HTML 5, it is still not possible to access some of the native capabilities of mobile devices from browsers due to security and privacy concerns (for example, access to address book or calendar).

The Wired iPad app is a beautiful example of static magazine content being made available in a highly interactive and multimedia-based content delivery format, without compromising on the magazine’s original free flow content designs, large visuals, large advertisements, and silky smooth page flip transitions. However, in many ways the content is confusing and unusable because of non-obvious controls, unintuitive interactions, and game design thinking. Read NN Group report on usability of iPad apps and websites.

Hybrid Experience of Information
Publications need to think — Does reading infotainment content always require such rich multimedia experiences? What about serious content readers who would want to read articles for hours? Does it make more sense to have subtle and clean reading experience for them?

Financial Times has designed a hybrid version of Web and native applications for their website (app.ft.com), optimized for an iPad. The website exploits HTML5 capabilities to load content in the background and provides a newspaper's page-after-page flip reading experience that is completely browser based. Users can easily differentiate the content reading experience from traditional Web content rendering without compromising the subtle simplicity.

Richness of Content is Expensive
Rich content comes with its weight and each bite of space on the iPad is expensive. Single copy of Wired magazine consumes half a gigabyte of storage space on the iPad before one can use it. Data on mobile is still expensive; downloading a copy of Wired using the 3G iPad connectivity would easily cost a fortune in many countries along with the time that it would take. And all of it will impact the end user experience.
Natural Digital Content Interactions Are Missing
In many ways native applications' designs reduce the user’s natural tendency of reading and interacting with the digital content. Features and controls that users use in browsers are not available (for example, copy text and photos and share it with friends by pasting it in an email). Features like bookmarking and printing pages are not available unless they are built seamlessly within the application.

Access and Reach
Digital content is highly search driven. To access a certain publication's content, users may use any of the search engines or they may find it via links from other websites, blogs, Twitter, and/or links embedded in emails. However, the mobile native apps currently do not support such navigation. So, if a publisher's marketing strategy is to increase the number of visitors and not bother about the repeat visitors, it makes sense to go for mobile optimized Web, especially if it is viral.

Media Advertising Means Money!
Advertising has been a primary source of revenue for most media companies across platforms. For a decade, it was believed that ‘Web users are ad blind’ and they don’t care about ads. At the same time, there has been a significant growth in various media companies' advertising budgets year after year. It’s time media content producers rethink about advertising.
Designers and marketers of traditional Web have worked on aspects like ad slots, positions, sizes, context, level of interactivity, personalization, and more but now iPad can potentially sail them far ahead in time. Ads designed for Wired app are more persuasive by being highly interactive. Perhaps there is scope to make them more meaningful, information exchangeable, intelligent and personalized by adding context sensitiveness. Advertising of such kind will certainly provide better branding mileage to advertisers and also the opportunity to get richer data in bargain. It might just be advertisers who will push publishers to go ‘tabletized’.

Editorial Control: Rigid vs Flexible vs Time to Publish
For publications that are in the business of providing real-time digital content, it is important to package content and keep updating it (for example, coverage of elections or scams). It becomes utmost important for the editorial staff to have flexibility and control over the content and presentation. Native application takes away that flexibility and control because of rigid content meta data structures and templates. Due to cumbersome maintenance and update routines in native applications and app stores, any change made to the app design can take weeks to happen. The work includes programming, testing, approval process, and then finally the end users have to actively choose to update the app. Mobile Web apps, however, require limited programming and testing, hence always providing users with the latest content and experience.

Content is King

2011-06-04T09:16:00.000+05:30

"People don’t read, especially when it comes to web and mobile" - I said that!

Content is important:

Content adds value
Content is part of user experience

And it is becoming increasingly important with the 'Mobile First' design philosophy coming into power. But, much of the mobile first design philosophy fails due to one big reason: CONTENT

And CONTENT failure is not a new phenomenon; it is to be seen even in web specific designs. If, we go to the root of the problem, then it is the different user behavior on web and mobile.

Keeping this in mind here are some guidelines to create content. These are applicable not just for Mobile but for web as well:

1. If first 160 characters do not sound meaningful, rest of content cannot be useful!

With reducing attention spans, one needs to impress the audience with the first 160 characters. If an idea can’t be put in short, there will be no one listening to it. And if there is no one listening then an idea is useless. So, it makes more sense to put in all the skills to make that 160 character impressive!

2. If everything is useful, then everything is useless

Yes! There has been no mistake in the above statement. If one thinks that everything is useful for a site’s target audience, then surely there has been a mistake. Usually, we tend to fill in so much content, that everything seems to be useless and a person tends to drift away.

3. Use scan-able keywords

Every user opens a site with something in mind. If that is not scanable or searchable then it is highly unlikely that the user will stay for more.

4. Start with conclusions and recommendations

Inverted pyramid style of writing is the key for every content on web and mobile. People want to know quickly about everything; no one has time to read on and on….

5. Attention grabbing headings, meaningful subheadings

Headings are to get attention and subheadings are to make use of that attention span. Keeping a subheading simple, without jargons and to the point helps to gain trust as well. Jargons, complex terms, clever lines are meant to be for the Main heading, keep them out of the rest!

6. A picture is worth 1000 words, but we don’t want 1000 words!! Do we??

The intention is to keep it simple, neat and easy to download. A picture may seem to be the best option to give a visual appeal and represent an idea, but it increases the size. And with download speeds varying unpredictably, sometimes, pictures are a blot to user experience.

Lost in Translation? Not Anymore

2011-05-29T14:26:00.006+05:30

A tourist in a foreign country can only dream of knowing the local language beforehand. Problems begin at the airport itself, when signage are of no help, and go all the way to the local transport, making it tough to reach places or communicate with cab drivers, and especially when it comes to restaurants' menu to select the right stuff.

When you are in such a situation, you are always worried about either running into a problem or missing out on stuff of your interest (locations, food, etc.) because you cannot communicate or read in the local language. Now, Google has launched a smart iPhone app, Google Translate, that supports translation of 57 languages.

The app allows you to translate in and out of using words or using your iPhone's microphone. While Google Translate doesn’t allow you to translate without an active data connection, you can store your most likely used translations and phrases and use them offline.

When Google Translate generates a translation, it looks for patterns in hundreds of millions of documents to help decide on the best translation for you. By detecting patterns in documents that have already been translated by human translators, Google Translate makes intelligent guesses to judge the most appropriate translation as output. This process of seeking patterns in large amounts of text is called statistical machine translation (SMT). However, in SMT, since the translations are generated by machines, not all translations are perfect.

While it is a great utility in time for travelers, it is still a machine mediator between you and the people around you who do not speak and understand your language. And the capability to translate the natural, free communication between the user and the people in real-time does not exist still. As a user of the application you are never sure of other persons’ interpretation of the translation either because of inter-language subtle cultural differences, voice and tone of the language, and/or lack of gestural explanations.

A company called Quest Visual has tried to resolve this small yet important aspect of communication. Quest Visual has invented a magical ‘World Lens’ application for the iPhone with amazing augmented really capabilities.

The application allows users to scan live views using the iPhone’s camera and translate words from Spanish to English (or vice versa) in real-time, replacing the originals in the same size, color, orientation and perspective. So now it doesn’t matter anymore whether it is a newspaper article, website content, hotel menu, or signage, all you need is Word Lens. The other exciting stuff is that the application doesn’t use active data connection to do the translations and therefore saves hundreds of dollars for travelers with active roaming data charges.

The application pushes handheld computing capabilities to make the optical character recognitions algorithms perform. The program runs the captured image through a filter to remove shadows and identify the sharpness around the text and removes everything that isn’t sharp enough. It then converts the image into black and white to further enhance text readability and do a dictionary look-up of the probabilistic text string for a closest match.

Finally, it re-renders the originally captured image by removing the original text and replacing it with the translated text string on top. Although it may sound straightforward, it is not really that simple by hand-held computing standards.
With companies such as Quest Visual creating such interesting and innovating stuff to make the overall travel experience more convenient, the future will be of an app-mesh created between augmented reality apps such as Google Goggles, World Lens, and utility apps like Google Translate with sophistication of two-way voice-to-voice translation.

Design for Everyone : Interaction Design for Differently-Abled

2011-05-18T09:50:00.016+05:30

“Usefulness is not impaired by imperfection”
Imagine a world with improved interaction, design of everyday things for differently able, bringing them to be a part of a country’s economic growth. This area has immense scope for designers from all disciples especially Interaction Design to benefit a social group that has not yet been able to access the full benefits of technology.

Wikipedia defines Interaction design: the structure and content of communication between two or more interactive "beings" to understand each other. Designing interaction for the applications, websites usable for differently able people aims in bringing millions of people in developing the country. Taking only the Indian context: According to WHO figure, 10 % of the Indian population is physically challenged; the Spastic Society quotes 70 million people with disabilities. The idea is to create a common platform embracing the technology and Interaction, gesture study of the differently able .Create meaningful relationships between people and the products and services that they use, from computers to mobile devices to appliances and beyond.

Broadly this can be categorized in broad groups i.e physical disability, sensory disability etc(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability). Accessibility is a challenge for people with disabilities. Differences in cognitive ability, sensory impairments, motor dexterity, and behavioral and social skills must be taken into account when designing interfaces using technology, assistive technology. The subject is complex in its own special way. The thought is to:

Create an interaction pattern before designing a product.

For the products that are ergonomically well designed for a commoner would prove useless for the disabled unless some redesign done.

Almost all the web based applications that exist currently needs to be redesigned for the differently able.
The interaction of these people with everyday products is important for designers to better understand their needs

Study gestures minutely to know the touchpoints and movements.
Iterate on already used and approved products and interfaces.
Usability testing becomes quintessential for such products, since most of our assumptions fail in these scenarios.
Each person is different in its own unique way, with extensive study, a pattern can be found that leads to the design of everyday things.

( in pic: mapping different position of fingers, touchpoints, approach of thumbs and fingers )

There are many communication and interaction devices for general people, but, the current communication interfaces and services are challenges for spastic individuals. The most sought after interactions by such people include simple services like changing a TV channel, playing a game, reading a book or keeping oneself busy. These are just a few of the scenarios that needs design > redesign .

Differently abled have the capability to adapt to changes better than able population. The people around these have a exceptional ideas to redesign everyday products to suit the needs in-a-way like jugaad . It is possible to design or reiterate the design to suite the need of people with disability.

Take an example of spastic people. They have restrictive movements of muscles, hence they can’t make abrupt movements or gestures. Detailed study of only one action ,has lead to evolving Assistive Technology products like jelly bean, switches etc, Text to speech, touch typing software brings some relief for using desktop applications. These are simple ideas but very useful. Ideas as simple as these can change somebody’s life and can make them one of us.

Thanks Ankush for reviewing the draft.

How to use QR Codes, or rather, how not to use QR codes!

2011-05-15T11:13:00.001+05:30

A count of Smartphone users, counting only US users, at the end of February 2011, gave an astonishing figure of 69.5 million! This number is definitely going to rise exponentially and the proof is visible everywhere around us. We find at least a couple of Smartphone users in our circles and others who don’t own one, always eye the new Smartphones from the corner of their eyes.

And along with Smartphone came in smarter things like QR codes. A QR Code is a 2 dimensional matrix code created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The "QR" is derived from "Quick Response". The creator’s intention was to create a code whose contents could be read at high speeds.

QR code is in the limelight and there are no ways about it. In a horde to use this somehow or the other companies are breaking their head, day and night. QR codes are seen everywhere from an outdoor hoarding to a magazine cover. An example of how the importance of QR codes is growing:

“Along with HTML5, QR codes will become a far more important part of the travel experience. These barcodes may soon be providing TV channel listings in hotels, in flight entertainment instructions on airplanes and itineraries on cruise ships.” -Ayan Banerjee, Senior Consultant, MindTree Ltd. Read the full article!

The tool is simple to use. Point the camera towards the QR code, and an in-built app will de-code the QR code to some data. This simplicity may have a lot of potential and appeal with the growing Smartphone user segment, but as long as it is not in the face of a user.

Here are some of the direct uses of a QR code:

· To initiate a browser session – This is the most abused one!

· To display text

· To initiate Email Transaction – An email can be initiated and even the message body can be populated

· To initiate SMS transaction

· To initiate Audio/Video Streaming

A prevalent use by marketing companies is to replace the sexy looking advertisement with an ugly looking black-and-white QR code. QR codes are supposed to enhance the Mobile Experience of a user. But, this should not be at the expense of ruining the physical appearances and experiences.

Let’s see what happened when some marketers used QR codes in this fashion. Most of the users who still don’t have Smartphone, struggled to understand what it was about. Smartphone users who didn’t know about QR codes struggled to understand how to use it. Smartphone users who had enough of it, passed on! Effectively the marketer lost on the customers, who looked at that advertisement, and could have read on about it but moved on, since it was either not understandable or too boring! What we also observe is that most of the marketers end up using the QR code as an alternative for people to click links. Therefore, it is not surprising when people perceive QR codes as just a link to the main advertising page of a company!

Is this what the advertisers/marketers were looking for? I believe not!

Some golden rules to keep in mind when devising campaigns using QR codes:

Everyone does not have a Smartphone
Every Smartphone user does not know how to use a QR code
Smartphone user who knows about QR code may be fed up of seeing them everywhere

Another key lesson for any marketer will be, to realize that QR code is not an alternative to a link. This has been over used and abused in all senses. It’s time that we think beyond this. Innovative use of these codes is the need of the hour!

Information Design for Product Display on e-Commerce Websites

2011-05-08T09:12:00.001+05:30

Designers often get biased to widely used interaction design patterns on Web. It makes it difficult for them to find a completely different way of looking at how people would like to deal with information dissection, manipulation, and retrieval on Web.

Many times there is too much of information, too much data, or too many options and choices to make sense of. Users can easily become frustrated or disengage if they can’t find a connection with what is presented to them. One such example is e-commerce websites serving millions of products across thousands of categories.

Most e-commerce websites serve product information in a list or in a grid view. Facet search panel on left comprising either check boxes or links, with bracketed number of products inside each category, is another universal pattern used for product retrieval and filtering. For example, a website selling digital cameras, printers, or flat panel television sets will allow users to filter assortments by technical information such as megapixels, aspect ratio, screen size, FPS, make, model, and more. Most of these facets are not useful for people to make buying decisions anymore.

Few websites show number of reviews to prove product popularity in the market without caring for how long the product has been there on the shelf. Comparing product features is not desirable either because it just rearranges the technical information in a big table where each product is a column and users are forced to scan the information row-by-row to understand which product is better over others. And as mentioned before, technical information does not anyway affect people's choice of product.

BE HUMANE

When people buy items of such kind as mentioned above, beyond the technical information they are interested in the purpose and use of such products. Let's take an example of an office purchase manager searching for a large flat panel television to be used in a conference room with a seating capacity of 10 people for presentations and Internet video calls. Internally, it can be mapped to technical information such as resolution 1024x768, low priced, and Internet ready, and more. Similarly, let's look at a man who wants to buy a digital camera to capture his son’s Tennis game. Suitable camera can be internally mapped to technical information such as high FPS, bigger aperture, and in-built filter, and more. In both examples, the important point is that people want to buy stuff that is aligned to their needs. They find it very difficult to map their needs to the technical search/filter/compare criteria provided by websites.

A designer should experiment with visual/information graphic facets that will allow people to filter and compare products on their practical and emotional needs instead of technical information alone. A very simple visual representation of information can help people make better decisions, and understand something that's really complex, and connect them emotionally.

POPULARITY

A product’s social popularity on the Web has become very important. Buying decisions have started to get influenced by people's online reviews of a product. It is time that e-commerce websites graduate from traditional popularity display patterns. Merely showing information such as "number of people recommendations," "number of people liked or disliked" or "number of reviews" is not good enough anymore.

Interface designers need to start experimenting with ideas that can generate popularity based on people’s reaction in a particular context, time, and specific need. For example, one could use data visualization, like pie charts, scatter plots, and relationship circles to compare two point-and-shoot cameras and display one being more popular than the other among amateur photographers for taking home pictures and not so popular among professional or wildlife photographers along with comparative results achieved. Such generic visualization patterns will add depth to the user interface and eventually make it more useful for buyers to make right decisions.

Why should one go for iPad : iFAD?

2011-04-30T10:23:00.002+05:30

In one of our team meetings recently, the topic jumped up again, "Why should one go for iPAD? Is it a Fad?"

There were mixed views for iPad. Some were of the view that iPad is a great product with advantages of being light and easy to carry. One can carry it along for presentations or on travel to read. Many others were of the view that a laptop can do much more than just presentations and reading. Finally, a general consensus was formed that probably "an iPad is a rich man's second laptop"!

Not long ago, we had termed laptops as "rich man's second computer", I didn't even realize when we moved ahead of that era, now I rarely see those big Personal Computers being purchased with as much vigor. Everyone seems to get Laptop or even better a Netbook. So, the confusion gets even worse.

Some more points to be pondered on.

The smartphones are becoming smarter. I think by the end of 2011 we will have smart phones with 3D projection capabilities, connectivity to all sort of networks and of course a processing power that can bring a laptop of today to shame!
Do we recall a device called "Pager"? It was a sort of "Twitter" on the go! Wasn't it revolutionary? Where did it go?
How many devices can a person carry without getting pissed off? One of my teachers once told me that a person can't manage more than 2 activities at a time: home and office, office and personal relationship, personal relationship and studies, studies and office. I think that time has been a proof for that statement, and I firmly believe in it. Extending the same theory, I am of the opinion that a person can't manage more than 2 devices successfully. Most of us must be having a laptop and a phone. If I bring in a iPad along, then one of the 2 former devices have to go! Either a laptop or the phone.
It is unlikely that we will go away with a phone. What else can we put in our pockets, hold in our hands and talk for hours on? Surely not an ipad! Until and unless we have custom designed clothes to hold them :)

There is no conclusion to this post. Rather, I am still confused on where we are heading to. Conclusively, I can only say that out of Laptops, Netbooks, Leaptops, iPads, phones, smart phones, smarter phones, Kindles, Adams and ... we will have to choose only 2 devices at a time. Most of the devices will converge into others and new devices will evolve over time. More fads will come, some will stay some will not even be mentioned in history.....

GIDS conference: My Experience

2011-04-25T11:29:00.004+05:30

Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS) was held on April 19 -22, 2011 at the green campus of IISc Bangalore. I attended the second day of conference, that was focused on Web trends and technologies. The sessions by Venkat and Harish were really good. The details of these and other sessions follow.

The conference began with “Building the next generation of experiences” by Arijit Chatterjee. Arijit is Engineering Manager for Platform Evangelism at Adobe Systems India. The trend of preferences for people is changing. Everyone wants to have better experiences, be it food, clothes or digital experiences. The experience has moved on from desktops, to laptops, to tablets and currently to smart phones. People want to have a meaningful, easy and engaging experience. There are essentially three areas of innovation in this:
1. Content authoring for the creators,
2. Customer experience management for businesses and
3. Online analytics and optimization to ensure the best value being delivered.

This session was followed by "Designing User Experiences for multi screen applications with Flash, HTML5 &CSS3" by Harish Sivaramakrishnan. Harish is a Platform Evangelist at Adobe Systems. He is also a UX design and usability expert. His talk highlighted the various devices available for communication, work etc today. The talk explored the possibility of designing the same user experience across all the different form factors i.e tablet, ipad, smart phones, desktop etc. Some practical ideas to be used by the developers to efficiently complete the coding , and the code that can be reused across all the different form factors, different screen resolutions using Adobe Flex, Flash, HTML 5 and CSS3. The programming tips and tricks were shared in these 3 platforms.

"HTML5 more than HTML5" was an interesting and thought provoking talk by Harish Vaidyanathan, who leads the evangelism efforts for Microsoft India. This session explored HTML5 and the session gave summary of HTML5 features. The session started with quick note of the logo design of HTML, and moved on to the features. Features include button curves, shadows, gradient can be done directly by coding. The button can have 4 different curve radii for 4 corners, button/ object can have shadow by placing lights .The best part is that while coding the screens can be checked by viewing in all the resolutions of different form factors. HTML5 combines the designer and developer skills and hence bridges the gap. Harish also gave aother session on "Unleashing a more beautiful web", some of the content was repetition of HTML and few features of IE 9.

"Towards a humane interface, aesthetic and usability" by Venkat Subramaniam. Venkat is the founder of Agile Developer,Inc. He has significant experience in design, architecture and development of software applications. The session gave an insight about usability in everyday interactions. Usability is more than just a “WOW” factor, it is more about making an application easier and intuitive to use. A successful application has to focus on three dimensions: business, design and usability. He gave few hilarious examples of User experience gone wrong in various products that he has come across. A spicejet check-in kiosk, Honda car to a programming language. The examples drawing to a very crucial point about Keep it Simple Stupid (KISS) rule. This was a fantastic simple session and will be sharing the presentation to MT UX community once i get my hands on it.

The conference gave insights on the changing technology and its usage. A better world of tomorrow for designers and developers .

Thanks Ankush for reviewing the draft.

What Game Designers Do That Interface Designer Don’t

2011-04-20T19:59:00.007+05:30

At many occasions stakeholders ask designers to design experiences that are simple yet immersive and engaging for commercial Web applications. They leave it completely to the designers to think of ideas to achieve such designs. But, commercial Web application designers are always busy designing applications that are a function of

(Over simplification of Web application design)

They make sure all the business rules are incorporated, the right system response is in place, the right set and amount of information is presented so the right decisions are taken and so on and so forth. I would also go ahead saying that there is nothing grossly wrong with that approach. And while the results are not always great designs, they are not bad either.

But there are traits of game designs that an enterprise application designer can experiment with and design experiences that are memorable and desirable for people who use them. Theoretically, game design is not all that different and designers from other fields are perfectly capable of doing much of what game designers do.

[A gross oversimplification of game design (Stephen Anderson’s way)]

Instant Gratification vs. Slow Response Time
In most commercial software interfaces response time management is completely overlooked. The rule is “faster is always better,” and Google has almost mastered it. Search results displayed are shown with how many milliseconds it took for Google to process the results. However, game designers don’t think likewise and they defy the concept of instant gratification by making a good use of response time. It is like one driving to a hill station on a vacation with friends and family where en-route experiences are equally important as reaching the destination is. Slow response time also allows users to think of their next move.

Closure to Completion Effect
Gamers become more aggressive, thrilled, and impatient when they come very close to completion of a level, task, or an activity in a game. But game designers design these activities to be highly unpredictable and vulnerable, to take the gamers' excitement to the peak (for example, a game of Jigsaw Puzzle or Sudoku at the verge of completion). Similarly, Web application designers can start thinking of ideas to make the last piece of a task or an activity more engaging and exciting.

Learn To Become More Efficient In Future
Gamers become more efficient as they play and eventually become experts at it. Game designers leave cues that gamers use as tricks and keys to reach the expert level. The vast majority of software user interfaces have no consideration for how users can be taught by experience with the system to improve their performance. It is about finding those hidden patterns in the way people interact and manipulate the system. It is an applied learning that a user gains and reuses in different conditions to get faster results.

Short-term Memory Management
People love gaming because it challenges their reflexes, thinking, intuition, and dedication as they make progress on higher levels with increased amount of complexity. Short-term memory management is a great tool for game designers to increase or reduced the complexity of the game. Interface designers are trained not to rely on user’s short-term memory (for example, showing a piece of information and expecting the user to remember it to reenter the same somewhere else in the system).

However, game designers use it quite often in forms of locations, maps, symbols, and passwords which the gamers need to remember to clear a level or to reach a place. For example, arcade games use word codes that are displayed when the level is completed. These codes are supposed to be remembered by the player to reenter to reach that level directly from beginning else he or she will have to pass through all the previous levels to get there. Similarly, the famous AngryBird game shows the cage structure once to the player and leaves it to the player’s imagination to strike in the right area.

Building Mystery
Game designers carefully design interactions that in a way expand the player's mind and force him or her to think what’s happening. It is the mild confusion created with just enough context to consume the player’s cognition in subtle and compelling ways.

Enterprise Web application designers think of making interaction highly intuitive and transparent at all times. They think of giving surprises by making the application learn users patterns and start intelligently predicting their next move and automate it.

MindTree UX Unveils the Mask @Osmosis ‘11

2011-03-27T18:21:00.014+05:30

At MindTree, it was again the season of Osmosis, the company’s annual event which is a platform to showcase and share knowledge of different verticals and groups with the rest of the MindTree Minds. For the MindTree UX team it was again a time to decide how to participate. We decided we’ll do something engaging and from then on there was no looking back. Two weeks in advance, our event planning began by creating a task force. We went crowdsourcing, looking for ideas, subjects, and disciplines which can be showcased as part of the overall theme of the UX stall. Our hunt for ideas generated umpteen ideas such as:

Beyond the ‘Social’ Network: how social network is being used for non-social purposes (both good and bad)

Immersive experiences: How the video games and 3-D technology will merge to create more immersive online experiences

Green design

The four dimensions of Information Design: beyond the organisation, that is, space and time

Information is a continuum (and not discreet interactions on individual devices)

Simplexity: how future systems will be designed ‘simple to interact’ feel with complex backend logic and processing behind the scene

Information overload

Connecting ideas and not pages (making sense of unstructured data)

Every idea sounded interesting. Unanimously the team decided to pursue a theme that impacts thinking of people in the system, that is, knowledge of user experience and its impact on people and business. In other words, an attempt was made to educate people that user experience design is not about making pretty screens. Design of a pleasing, usable interaction requires effort from various disciplines such as graphic design, information design, interaction design, human factors, psychology, usability, ergonomics, and knowledge of business and technology trends. We wanted to convey the message: “UX is not just about pretty face.”

UX Osmosis stall was inaugurated by our youngest UX designer Ramshi Hamza. We designed the stall to attract and encourage all to participate in Osmosis. We all joined together to have fun.

The concept of ‘Time Travel: Design, Business & Technology’ was the lead communication (10ft by 5ft flex poster) designed by Vallabh, Baizil, and Ankush. The poster showed design, business and technology advancements over the last 15 years, with the intention to describe how the ‘push and pull’ between technology, business and design has forced each other to reinvent. It also showed how many other disciplines such as human factors, psychology, usability, ergonomics, and anthropology became part of the mainstream design practices. We asked participants to come and share their views on what they think the future of business, technology and design would be. We got some interesting responses that we will be publishing in the later issues.

Some of these videos showed the futuristic designs especially about ubiquitous computing and some user interviews that we carried out to understand the behavior with respect to social media spaces. We discussed immersive experiences through examples of work done by other design practitioners. But the actual learning of immersive experiences came only by experiencing Microsoft Kinet (Thanks to Danny for making the arrangements!). Many MindTree Minds joined us playing and enjoying the game irrespective of their position, age, etc. Watch the videos to watch them play!

We wanted to engage people in a design lead activity where they could feel a sense of participation and achievement. We made 20 paper boats with cartridge sheets and provided paints and brushes to people and asked them to unleash their creativity and talent. We allowed them to be creative in their own ways. Very quickly we realized that we have 20 people painting at a time and almost the same number waiting for their turn. We had to arrange for more paints, brushes, and boats. At last we ended up with 140 boats painted by MindTree Minds that are now available as a collage fixture at fourth floor in the Phase 1 building of MindTree West Campus. On an average each participant spent 10-15 minutes painting a boat; such an immersive participation would be difficult to achieve in an art competition. Thanks to Diba, Shobha, Ramshi, and Vinay A. for making it happen.

Vot'ah design: Participants were asked to vote for the purpose of design. They were asked whether "Design is problem-solving" or "Design is fun". Two examples used for illustration were:

Design is fun: A glider that is designed to capture unusual video shots from different angles in the air. Users will launch the glider in an open space; a small camera mounted on the nose of glider will record video of people on the ground.

Design is problem solving: An electric socket that is designed to accept any pin size and voltage and has an extension cord, if required, with capabilities to carry mobile phone on top.

Participants were asked to choose a theme and also leave a comment in support of their choice. In three hours, there were 80 people who had voted and of which 65% chose design more problem-solving than fun. The other activity was to hunt for web parts (treasure) or broken web page components to build as one. People were given two choices of designs before they started playing the game. Thanks to Natraj and Shobha for designing and executing such learnable experiences. The Osmosis UX stall was a wonderful example of superb coordination, self-motivated team-work, and a sense of expression and play. I sincerely thank Ankush, Baizil, Chinmoy, Danny, Diba, Hetna, Mukesh, Natraj, Ramshi, Vallabh, Veena, Vinay A, Vineet, Satya, Shobha, and all the participants for their contribution and support.

MindTree UX Osmosis '11 Photos

2011-03-27T00:24:00.000+05:30

adiVERSE virtual footwear wall

2011-02-16T09:37:00.009+05:30

The future of retail lies in bringing together the worlds of digital and retail to offer extraordinary in-store customer experiences. Unveiled at the 2011 National Retail Federation Expo in New York, this interactive, real-time rendered product installation for adidas demonstrates UK brand agency Start JudgeGill’s belief in “connected retail.” The experience brings shoppers the products they want, even if they’re not currently available in a store, and gives adidas the opportunity to offer its largest range of products in even its smallest stores. Behind the scenes, the system is currently gender and age-aware and presents relevant products faster; adidas will eventually enhance the shopping experience by placing products in the context of the sport for which they’re designed. Once the success of the adiVERSE system for footwear is tested and demonstrated, there are plans to expand to apparel and accessories, in stores worldwide.

While this is a cool in store experience design concept. I am still wondering that this concept is very similar to web experience of http://www.nikeid.nike.com/.

In store experiences are all about touch and feel and in store social interactions. Customers walk in to Adidas store with bunch of friends and they spend time comparing assortment based on style, color, pattern, texture, price etc. Customers often see stuff online and make purchases in a nearby store. It is good that customers will be able to see all products even when they aren’t available. But can be a bad experience if they like something and not able buy instantly (specially for impulsive buyers)

I believe such digital displays can be a good idea for mobile stores where stores have dummy phones on display.

This installation works well when customer service reps are busy and there’s no one to explain the details. However, most customers typically wear the shoes, walk around a bit to check if it the right one. Maybe, they can use a combination of haptics and Kinect’s technology to give a real feel of the shoe.

Why a person need another interface such as iPad to check out the shoe?

Well, there can be various reasons to do so. One of them can be: In major metros the rental spaces are going sky high, the display is limited and in western countries even the labour is expensive. In such cases, you cannot have all the shoe models out on display in a mall commercial store. So, it is better to give alternative mediums to customers for checking out the collection. One such medium is Ipad, Iphone, or big touch screens as shown in the video.

But then why don’t we integrate later part (iPad) with the initial one (wall)? Suddenly, there is change of experience and person has to wait on the shop keepers to receive the iPad.

Possibly becuase when the person on the video said “now you can checkout” I was thinking OMG checkout on that screen …where world can see all the personal information !!!.

So having the checkout done on a smaller personal display is a clever way to maintain individual’s privacy. I am curious however to understand how they can transition the session from wall to a device like iPad, that is probably beginning of new era in transitioning from one device to another without breaking the flow.

Imagine you are working in office and you are half way through filling your appraisal online…., then you walk to train station and complete the remaining form filling on the phone (same session)…. Later submit it from home computer in the (same session). It is a good a way, to keep the our transactions secured.

Then the other question would be, why the checkout is not happening at the checkout counter?

Well, if we have same session then will it not affect the security, I would imagine that someone could get to the sensitive information. Well, that’s a valid point, But, for us to understand it, let’s go through a small exercise.

Suppose you walk into a shoe store. There is a security guard at the entrance. You go to the display counter and look through the range of shoes on display. When you like a couple of them, you ask the salesman to get the sizes for those particular shoes. You will even like to try out those shoes. Then you zero down on one of the choices, and move towards the payment counter. There the cashier bills you accordingly and you walk out of the store. The security may again check your bills and match it with the purchased items.

Now, we see that there are at least 3 people involved in the whole transaction for one customer. Many stores go away with the security guard. The store that we saw in the video has gone a step ahead and removed the cashier and salesman as well. In effect we have highly reduced the manual intervention, which is highly desirable in high labour cost economies or businesses where ratio of labour cost to purchase cost is high.

I agree upon the point that it would reduce the manual interventions. Here store keeper approaches the customer with an iPad. It do not seem to be a practical to me, to keep a person ready to take iPad to customer.

As discussed before, the experience at the store is to have social interaction through touch and feel.

Being to show rooms of cell phones, I look up those cell phones and I hardly read any information that is printed next to the phone. Instead, I ask the sales representative about the product. And make him compare on the different products that I am interested in. And, I know I might be able to get the relevant information from any other web source. At store, I am getting the experience of interacting with other person, who can somewhat able to relate to me.

I think a retail store is about the personal connection, real experience (look, touch and feel) and also to help buyer make their right decision. For instance – Some time back one of my friends wanted to buy a sports watch (Having features of Altimeter, Barometer, Thermometer, Tide Graph, Heart Beat etc.). He was getting a discount price online but not in the store. So he short-listed some models browsing the online product list, specifications and prices. He also read the reviews of those watches but was not able to finalize the model that he should go for. He was skeptical as the watch was pretty costly and the virtual image differed from the real one (look, touch and feel). Finally he visited the store (Bangalore Central Mall), had a real experience (by trying out, comfort, product aesthetics when he is wearing it, etc.), and talked to the sales representative and zeroed down the final one. After that he confidently placed an order online.

Focus here (Adidas) is to guide and motivate people to purchase by leveraging information of 8,000 pair of shoes (without having to be a flagship store), technical specifications, related videos and user feedback. But the real product display and sales man shouldn’t be replaced with the touch screen. (The salesman helps buyer to try out different shoes, Buyer decides the final one based on the comfort and similar other parameters) Therefore I think creating a virtual experience in a physical store will only help in getting information about the products in a smart way but cannot succeed in the real experience of buying the product by physically going to the store. If that was possible then the consumer need not go to the store and can buy the stuff online itself from home.

Success of a business depends on the end user’s satisfaction after using the product. One of the criterias to satisfy user is to ensure user to use the appropriate and right product for him. Physical store helps and guides user to do this in an effective and simpler way.

- Post is sumamry of email discussion on virtual footwear wall concept. Thanks to all discussion participants - Vallabh, Baizil, Ankush, Jana, Chinmoy and Veena.

Donation box design at TATE Modern

2011-02-11T21:28:00.007+05:30

TATE Modern in London operates completely on the support of its visitors (over 8 million per year), trusts, foundations, and corporations. Therefore, it is important for the TATE to generate enough interest in people to make donations and keep the functions of the museum going.

Donation is an act of willingness and care. Most donation boxes remain empty as people don’t feel motivated enough to participate in the donation process. Designers of TATE donation box have made efforts to understand the motivational aspect of such donation activity. They have designed the box to enhance the whole experience of donating a few pence with a sense of play and achievement.

The donation box has been designed in such a way that when donors drop coin into the box, it doesn't reach the bottom immediately. Rather it stumbles down from one obstacle to another placed on its way down the bottom. People (especially kids) make multiple attempts to make sure that it takes long for the coin to finally settle at the bottom of the box. This experience is quite opposite to the one that we get while playing Tilt Maze Game where the objective is to bring the metal ball in the center of the maze as quickly as possible.

TATE offers a range of attractions for all kinds of people (tourists, art enthusiasts, artists, and designers), including kids accompanied by their parents, who come to explore and witness the various art lead happenings in the museum. While kids are not real donors, they happen to be the biggest participants in the donation process at TATE. Children accompanied by adults (mostly parents) get fascinated with whole process of donation as a playful activity without really understanding the reason of it. TATE exemplifies in best of ways how experiences that are designed keeping people's context, activities, and motivations in mind are far more effective than other initiatives.

Experience Sense of Touch Through Haptics

2010-11-18T21:19:00.002+05:30

Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is considered to be the intersection of computer science, cognitive science, design and several other fields of study, and is a multidisciplinary field centered on people’s interactions with computers in various respects. Practitioners and researchers endeavor to understand people’s behaviors and actions in order to make computers more usable and receptive to people’s needs. People interact with machines using their physical senses including sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. Wikipedia notes, “Senses are the physiological capacities within organisms that provide inputs for perception” [1]

The importance of touch in HCI
One way of interacting with a device is by using the sense of touch. “The touching is not limited to feeling, but it allows interactivity in real-time with virtual objects” [1]. In HCI, Haptics is a field that allows people to interact with computers. A haptic device gives people a sense of touch with computer generated environments, so when virtual objects are touched, they seem real and tangible [2]. Haptic devices are capable of measuring bulk or reactive forces that are applied by the user; it should not be confused with touch or tactile sensors that measure the pressure or force exerted by the user to the interface.

“Haptic technology, or haptics, can be defined as feedback technology that takes advantage of a user's sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations, and/or motions to the user” [1]. Haptics are implemented through different types of interactions. These interactions can be categorized into the different types of touch sensations a user can receive—force feedback, tactile feedback, and proprioception (or kinesthesia) [3]. For instance, you can change a conventional mouse into a haptic mouse by adding force feedback capability, or, in other words, a haptic mouse reacts to responses for users to make a decision.

Examples of where it is used and who benefits from haptic device
In recent years we have seen how the sense of touch has become an integral part of how we experience things, both physically and emotionally [2]. Haptic devices can be used in different applications including computers, video games, mobile consumer technologies, research, medicine, and robotics.

Most of us are familiar in using touch screen technology on cell phones; a person can interact with electronic visual display using the sense of touch. It is said to be a haptic touch screen when it provides users with true tactile feedback that supports a multitude of touch and gesture effects [4].

Haptic devices provide greater potential for people who are visually challenged. Haptic technology can assist a blind person in making right decisions while interacting with technology using the feedback provided to them. A recent study conducted at “VI Fit” [5] provides evidence for how a haptic device can benefit blind users.

Product Designers can benefit from free form modeling on products. Three-dimensional detailed shapes can be formed for manufacturing if input devices that give touch feedback relating to the "surface" they are modeling allowing faster and more natural workflow than with traditional methods [5]. These technologies could help designers creating video games with rich rendered Three-Dimensional environments that can be hard to navigate on a two-dimensional screen.

An experienced designer can create interfaces through which the end user can feel the product before purchasing the product. Designers can provide a greater experience for end user allowing them to feel the product with their own hands, for example, when an end user wants to buy a luxury watch such as Breguet. Haptics is an emerging field in HCI and many researchers around the globe are working on providing a physical experience for virtual objects.

Thanks to Vinay Dixit for reviewing

References:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic_technology
[2] http://home.novint.com/novint/whatis3dtouch.php
[3] http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/other-gadgets/haptic-technology2.htm
[4] http://www.pacinian.com/applications
[5] http://www.sensable.com/products-freeform-systems.htm

Using Patterns Around Us as Inspiration

2010-11-17T11:20:00.033+05:30

Last Design Friday, we had a session on using 'Patterns' we see around us as an 'Inspirational' source book into our design, mainly to help define UI Patterns.

The objective was to use these patterns (from our surroundings) to solve some of the design problems in the UI.

Below are few pictures from that session:

Collage of patterns folks captured from their surroundings -

Participants in the workshop -

Presentation by attendees...

Rapid prototyping for tangible user interface designs

2010-11-09T22:25:00.000+05:30

As designers we apply participatory approaches of engaging users and stakeholder in the design process for better design outcomes. Using white board, affinitive mapping, brainstorming, wire-framing, prototyping etc. in order to arrive at functional specifications are common practices required in product development. These activities not only serve the purpose of design but also to communicate ideas and concepts to various stakeholders.

The idea is to understand if conventional design techniques would stand complexities around designing Tangible User Interfaces (TUI). Let’s explore in detail. TUI is a user interface, where a user interacts with digital information through physical representation. Designing for TUI brings various challenges to designers primarily due to physical representation of digital information and variety of complex interactions available. Watch this video for a better understanding.

For designing a TUI system, a designer needs to consider physical objects, physical actions, interactions and physical environment because everything is an interface that interacts. More than just complexities around TUI itself, there are challenges with respect to effective communication of design concepts to stakeholders for their buy in. This leads to a few questions to our use of conventional design approach. How effective our conventional design approached would be for TUI designs? Should we adapt to rapid prototyping technique? Would rapid prototyping help designers conceptualize and communicate ideas better.

Consider a brainstorming session; we bring a mix of designers, developers, implementers, managers, stakeholders and users. Brainstorming brings ideas to the table in order to solve a design problem. During such sessions, the effectiveness of communication is maintained by making use of whiteboards, post-its, paper and pen. Mostly the systems we design are for two-dimensional space. But when it comes to design for three-dimensional spaces, we should be using three-dimensional objects. We know it is important for people to express their views and have effective communication to develop innovative ideas. Rapid prototyping with three-dimensional object would be major drive to bring people into action.

In designing for TUI, it seems important for designers to use three-dimensional objects for prototyping. By introducing such dimensions communication and engagement of groups can be increased. This could help designers to visualize the space that they are designing for. And in addition, designers can investigate on affordance and metaphors used of the group to formulate the thought process. This approach can produce positive outputs during discovering phase of a product development lifecycle and to frame them during definition phase.

Special Thanks to
Vinay for editorial hands
Tangible Bits for sharing the video

Is Crowdsourcing firing Designers?

2010-10-18T15:15:00.019+05:30

Recently when customers rejected the new redesigned GAP logo, GAP decided to crowdsource the redesign exercise to help define their brand.
The entire GAP redesign exercise emphasized that if designers do not do their job well and management do not make wise decisions, the customers reject it (after all the customer is the king). And they will also suggest a redesign of the brand for you!

There may be many reasons why the design exercise could have gone wrong - like management making all the design decisions or underestimating design or their customers (thinking they would blindly accept their chosen logo). The management have realized that their decisions are not final, even when it comes to logo redesign. And the outpouring on the social media on this topic suggests customers do care for products they have been buying over the years.

As the blame is now on the design firm who came up with this logo and GAP having decided to crowdsource instead, how do the rest of us (designers) ensure we do not fall into such situations? And how do we ensure crowdsourcing does not fire us and instead we work hand in hand. Moreover, what will our role be henceforth?

If you look back, from the time digital media entered the lives of designers (in 90's), designers needed to had these basic skills:

Idea generator, Creative, at times think out of the box
Understands problems, users and provides appropriate solutions
Produce aesthetically pleasing designs – have good knowledge in color theory, typography, layout, etc.
Apply usability/ ergonomic principles
Be proficient in all design softwares (esp. Adobe products)
Work with team

With the explosion of the internet since late 90s, where anyone can access basic tutorials on Graphic design and opensource tools like GIMP, consumers are now taking a shot in designing, just like photography. And companies are trying to capitalize on this through ‘crowdsourcing’, just like what GAP is doing now, as it turns out much cheaper than hiring a design firm! Added to this, the design is created directly by the end user and their needs are being stated through design.

An amateur designer can have all the points mentioned earlier to a certain extent. S/he may be creative, have ideas, execute solutions in an amateur manner using the design tools. There will be more tools in future which will auto-suggest color combination, layout (just like what templates have already begin to do now)

However, crowdsourcing will also generate enormous individualistic data and management will still need to pick the right design which will reflect everyone's perception of the brand or idea. This is where we designers can capitalize.

Our roles in future will mainly be to –

Engage users
We will need to draw ideas from everyone, while allowing everyone to express themselves, which in turn makes customers feel they are being engaged in the entire exercise. We collect their inputs (data) for our design process and to further validate our design to the client with the populist data. We can also revalidate our design again through crowdsourcing and when the design is finally out in the market, the users will be proud of the outcome!

Analyze and draw insights
We will need to use crowdsourcing for design research to get insights to our design. The data collected from users through crowdsourcing (eg: pictures of their daily routine, etc.) will ultimately help create better products.

Induce design thinking
A designer will need to induce design thinking in the organization or team, and drive the design exercise, with team members, stakeholders and customers, getting their hands dirty in design implementation. A designer’s role will be to facilitate and bring out the best ideas from everyone and manage the entire design exercise! And use ‘Crowdsourcing’ as one of the methods from user research to design implementation.

And how do we designers achieve this - We will however need to focus more on design strategy and behavioral aspects. The technical aspects like layout, typography, usability heuristics will be automated in future. We will need to think cross-disciplinary rather than specialize in individual fields like graphic, fashion or industrial design in future.

The client/ management will also need to understand the importance of design, branding and be more involved in the design exercise while giving powers to the designer to make strategic decisions.

Thanks to Vinay and Anshuman for their inputs on the role of a designer in future.

'Change by Experience Design' Approach

2010-10-07T23:07:00.004+05:30

All disciplines change continuously, be it management, engineering, medical science, or design. Change is critical and, at the same time, dynamic. It needs to be managed gradually by people in practice. Quality that was once a differentiating factor and a competitive advantage is now a factor of hygiene and is rather expected by default. Similarly, practices such as TQM and Six Sigma that were once central to businesses are still of value but are unable to provide the next big boost.

Businesses have the tendency to think inside-out even when they consider external forces such as market demand and competition. The focus is more on ‘How’ can we better what we are doing in current business practices. Mostly this ‘how’ thinking leads to small refinements and incremental changes only.

We as designers (user experience designers in this case) argue that design is fundamentally different, both by thinking and execution. A design approach needs to impact the ‘how’ thinking of businesses. Design needs to become the centripetal force of an organization to make it think more of ‘What?’ than ‘How’.

Focus on customer needs, not products – Instead of getting into the race to bring new product features to market, companies need to refocus on the needs of their customers. Some of them may want fewer features and yet simple and intelligent stuff.

Understand people and context, not just 'users’ – When we talk about customers, they are more than just 'users’ of a system – users that are defined by segment, roles, knowledge, skills, demographics, etc. We need to see beyond their learned behaviors, mental models, mindset, tasks orientation, etc. and must start looking at other dimensions that can provide a complete picture of a person. This means we must understand that our customers are people with natural behavior and desires affected by beliefs, attitude, expectations, personality, prior knowledge, experiences, and emotions, and more.

Look beyond tasks and explore ‘activities’ – Activities can be task or goal agnostic. For example, entertainment-oriented experience such as watching television is a passive way of consuming content without really a goal-focused task. Unilever ice cream truck can be another such example. This means, designers need to understand the motivations behind activities rather than looking only at the tasks performed. The motivations behind an activity could be social, monetary, emotional, and/or ideological.

Reinforce brand with every interaction, not just by communication – Traditional brand messaging is losing its power to influence consumers and therefore there is a need to expand branding efforts beyond marketing communications, to define how customers should be treated and engaged. This is the reason why some of the traditional creative and branding agencies are either transforming into digital agencies or are losing ground. Brands need to continuously innovate and find newer ways to translate their brand attributes and promises into interactive experiences for their customers.

Customer experience design and delivery is a competence, not a function – Designing great experiences is ain't a designer’s job alone – strategists, technology geeks, subject matter experts, and customers are equally responsible and participative in the entire process. Similarly, delivering great customer experiences cannot be achieved only by a small group of people, rather everyone in the organization needs to be fully engaged in the effort as the impact needs to be made at all levels in an organization, including its core value system.

Playful children and creative thinking

2010-10-04T17:27:00.001+05:30

Children are a great source of creativity when it comes to games and entertainment. Children are interesting to be learned and studied. Kids seem to be ignorant, but they are very creative than most adults are. They can turn anything into a game. Here you can see the pictures of children playing. I found them pretty interesting, I observed them playing some sort of a game for a while and it gave me insights on the creativity of design.

Setting up the rules

They played this game for about an hour or so. To my amazement, I found that they were following some protocols or rules for this game. It seemed to me that players played the game with predefined game rules. This game consisted of two teams, one on one side and two boys and on the other side. And a baby girl was accompanying them, but did not participate in the game. As I think, the girl is about 18 or 19 months old and probably can’t participate. The players are trying to hit the other player with the sack as seen in the picture. And there was some kind of point system based on the hitting other team. They have made boxes for each team; a team member is not allowed to step outside the square. And if you step outside of the square, if so you lose some points.

If I were to design the game, I will probably relate to the pillow fight that I had with my brother in my childhood. Well, I do not know, how these children made this entertaining game for them. What kind of strategic planning they did? Did they relate to some other game? What is the metaphor they used here? Are there any similar games available? Are they following some framework? Many questions cross my mind.

Creativity with fewer resources

These children are not receiving healthy food, medical facility, not even having proper sanitation facilities, and not having proper shelter. I would doubt that they would have ever played with a toy. They lack the resources that we have in our daily lives. But they do not lack in creativity. I felt that they are amazing designers. They made a game with fewer resources they got.

We also work with fewer resources such as time and money. Our client creates our world wherein we are set to deliver them enjoyment based on the resources they have provided. A designer’s puts on creative hat to provide innovative solutions. We perform strategic planning to determine how we go about doing our activities. We further set rules on how a system should look, what kind of functionality it should possess, how it should behave, we try to determine user goals, usability goals and many more. We provide creative designs to our customer and provide them greater satisfaction and better experience.

Children may not be thinking any of these things that we think about. All that they want is to enjoy the time that they have. As these children, we should thrive to produce creative product in a new way, or invent something that does not exist or reapply an existing process or product into a new or different domain. Hence, creating better experience and happiness to our customers as well for us.

Thanks to Vinay for the reviewing of this post.

Cooking the Engaging Experience Iteratively

2010-09-23T08:54:00.013+05:30

Iterative design is like preparing the popular sweet of West and South India – Puran Poli (in Marathi) or Holige’ / Obbattu (in Kannada).

Traditionally, the entire process of making Puran Poli was very social, where women gathered around and would discuss their problems or share their joys while preparing the dish.

Image source: http://swadofindia.blogspot.com/2007/03/too-many-cooks.html

In the design process, we can start with brainstorming sessions and interactive workshops which ‘engage’ the stakeholders, team members and end users to make the product create the ‘engaging experience’. We can also collectively derive at ‘Scenarios’ to capture the ‘social’ aspect of the product being designed.

A scenario talks about the user, situation and user’s goal. Let’s assume we are designing a mixer grinder (blender), one of our scenario can be ‘Mrs. Joshi and her friends want to make a traditional sweet dish for Ganesh Chathurthi. She needs the blender to help her prepare the sweet while talking to her friends’. Mrs. Joshi will then need a mixer which does not disturb the conversation with her friends. If so, then it needs to make very little noise so that it does not drive her friends away from the blender or disrupts the ‘engaging experience’.

Engaging experience can be built iteratively by thinking on 'what features to have', 'how to implement' and 'when to implement'. Iterative design involves building the core essence of the product first and later building over and around the core essence in several sprints. Just like the puran poli where the ‘core’ is jaggery and channa dal, which gives the dish its taste.

Image source: http://swadofindia.blogspot.com/2007/03/too-many-cooks.html

The process of preparing the ‘core’ (Hoorna or Puran) begins with the right mixture of jaggery, channa dal and cardamom. This mixture can be eaten as is and is the bare minimum to be considered a sweet by itself. This is similar to KANO’s model of ‘Must haves’ in a product. So in the above scenario, the ‘Must haves’ of the blender is built around the features supporting the ‘quiet performance’.

Image source: http://swadofindia.blogspot.com/2007/03/too-many-cooks.html

Once the goals and scenarios to achieve the goals have been established, the next process is to divide these into iterations, on how to achieve the must-haves (core), the extended features and the delighters.
While making Puran poli, the next stage will be to use the core (Puran or Hoorna) as a filling. This is similar to the extended features the product will have around to enhance the ‘core’ or goal.

Image source: http://swadofindia.blogspot.com/2007/03/too-many-cooks.html

Here, we can re-validate our features which go around the product. Can it still be packaged as puran poli or if suddenly realize there are no right ingredients, can it be packaged as something else like Kadabhu (Karjai). Either ways, the core (jaggery+ channa dal) still remains the same.

In iterative design process the requirements may change over course of time, however the ‘goal’ of the user still remains the same. Eg: The blender instead of just being table top can now be combined with a micro-wave oven, so that it cooks while blending. Or, an application to help users get live traffic update can change from being a web application to a mobile application to better help users while driving. In both examples, the goal – ‘to provide quiet performance’ or ‘to get live traffic update’ remains the same as the ‘core’ filling of Puran poli or Kadabu.

Image source: http://swadofindia.blogspot.com/2007/03/too-many-cooks.html

Once the decision has been made, the next level of preparation begins. The Puran poli is fried and the product is ready to be packaged.

Image source: http://swadofindia.blogspot.com/2007/03/too-many-cooks.html

Finally, packaging the product is similar to serving Puran poli with ghee on top or serving it with milk on a banana leaf. The aroma creates the aspect of ‘delight’. Just like how products need to have ‘delighters’ or pleasant surprises which helps go beyond the basic necessities.

Image source: http://swadofindia.blogspot.com/2007/03/too-many-cooks.html

The core of the Puran poli can also be extended to other dishes. Usually the left-over hoorna is used for making a special rasam - Kattina saaru (in Kannada) or Kaatachi Aamti (in Marathi). The experience is extended as it is had after eating the sweet dish. Or, even if someone does not have the puran poli itself. This is similar to extending a product’s brand to other mediums. Eg: creating a section on Facebook or Twitter to market the product.

Throughout the entire process of preparing Puran Poli - from planning, cooking, to serving, and even eating it, is very interactive, spontaneous and social. These are the qualities we designers need to incorporate to make our design process more ‘engaging’ apart from providing an engaging experience to the end users. We need to ensure we engage our stakeholders and team members in all stages of our design process to decide on ‘what the product will have’ and ‘how to implement the product’.

Few methods a designer can use - User stories are helpful to begin and also draw boundary for conversation between team members. Creating story maps based on scenarios along with other team members can help decide how to iteratively develop the product. Interactive quick sketches by inviting other team members to sketch (if they wish) their ideas on top of our sketches or critique your sketches also leads the team to engage in your design and encourages to be expressive as well.

Thanks to Swapna for sharing these awesome pictures on preparing the Puran poli. Recipes to make other delicious dishes can be found on her blog - http://swadofindia.blogspot.com/

Design considerations for touch screens – Part2

2010-08-25T17:24:00.003+05:30

Pros and Cons of Touchscreens
The following overview lists advantages and disadvantages of touchscreens and summarizes their characteristics.

Touchscreen Pros
Direct: Direct pointing to objects, direct relationship between hand and cursor movement (distance, speed and direction), because the hand is moving on the same surface that the cursor is moving, manipulating objects on the screen is similar to manipulating them in the manual world

Fast (but less precise without pen)

Finger is usable, any pen is usable (usually no cable needed

No keyboard necessary for applications that need menu selections only -> saves desk space

Suited to: novices, applications for information retrieval, high-use environments

Touchscreen Cons
Low precision (finger): Imprecise positioning, possible problems with eye parallaxis (with pen, too),
the finger may be too large for accurate pointing with small objects -> a pen is more accurate.

Hand movements (if used with keyboard): Requires that users move the hand away from the keyboard; a stylus requires also hand movements to take up the pen.

Fatigue: Straining the arm muscles under heavy use (especially if the screen is placed vertically).

Sitting/Standing position: The user has to sit/stand close to the screen.

Dirt: The screen gets dirty from finger prints.

Screen coverage: The user's hand, the finger or the pen may obscure parts of the screen.

Activation: Usually direct activation of the selected function, when the screen is touched; there is no special "activation" button as with a light pen or a mouse.

This post is contributed by Mallikarjun

Design considerations for touch screens – Part1

2010-08-23T10:16:00.005+05:30

Touchscreens - The Future
Touchscreens are operated as city guides, in museums, at POS (point-of-sale)stations or as kiosks(standalone advertising booths with user interaction) and now in the recent have made way into homes in the form of DPFs and Multimedia phones. Interaction has to be simple and fast as Users are often untrained. This calls for a screen and interaction design, which is considerably different from normal user
interface design.

Interaction
Touchscreens are operated with a finger or stylus. Therefore, they provide a very direct interaction - the most direct interaction that is possible on computers today. Touchscreens may be operated very fast for certain operations and require little or no training, if applications are designed adequately. For these reasons touchscreens have many uses, especially for untrained users. Many people believe that
touchscreens will replace keyboard and mouse in the future.

The Ultimate Judge is the User!
These preliminary design guidelines for touchscreens take the characteristics of touchscreens, their advantages and disadvantages, into account. Of course, these guidelines will be refined, as our experience with touchscreens grows. The ultimate judge, however, is the user. As ELO Touch Systems quote in their guidelines:

·Testing a touchscreen application on focus groups will disclose the areas that need improvement.
·If anyone pauses in confusion for even a moment, think how to improve the application.

Summary of Touchscreen Characteristics
·Speed: high
·Accuracy: low (finger), high (pen)
·Speed control: yes
·Continuous movement: yes
·Directness: direction, distance, speed
·Fatigue: high
·Footprint: no
·Best uses: point, select

Uses for Touchscreens
Best Suited to Applications Where...
·Opportunity for training is low
·Frequency of use is low
·Accurate positioning is not required
·Little or no text or numerical input is required
·Desk space is at a premium
·The environment may be chemically or otherwise "aggressive"

Not Suited to Applications...
·Requiring training/trained users
·With high-frequency use
·Requiring accuracy
·Requiring a lot of typing

Typical Touchscreen Systems
·Public information systems: Museums, city guides
·Kiosk systems: Advertising, product information
·Systems requiring pointing and selection only

Golden Rules
Speed: Make your application run fast. Speedy systems also reduce vandalism.
Intutiveness: Try to make the application intuitive.
Choices: Limit choices.
Guidance: Guide the user as much as possible.
Testing: Testing a touchscreen application on focus groups will disclose the areas that need improvement. If anyone pauses in confusion for even a moment, think how to improve the application.

This post is contributed by Mallikarjun

Applying Principles of Salsa Dancing into UX Design

2010-08-13T08:45:00.005+05:30

Salsa, a popular Latin American dance, and UX design have a lot of elements in common . And designers can apply some of these principles into their process.

The most important aspect in salsa (or even ballroom dance) is getting the connection right between the dancers. Similarly, for a design to succeed, the designer has to connect with the end user- understand their mental models, predict how the user would navigate, consider the user’s likes and dislikes , and design appropriately. The designer cannot design a product just because s/he finds it cool or creative.

Good dance has well synchronized sequences. This is similar to the sequence of tasks a user does. Designers usually define scenarios to define how the product will be used. The smoother the sequence is, the better the end user experience.

Movements are building blocks to any dance, which define a sequence. Similarly, every interaction in a design defines how well the task can be completed.

Patterns of foot work, swivels and turns help be a better lead and a receptive follower. The designer also needs to understand patterns in usage of elements, problems faced by users and design in a way which would be well-received by user. Patterns in rhythm and beats set the overall mood on the dance floor. Similarly, the designer needs to consider current trends or ‘mood’ to create the appropriate designs.

Space and path (floor path) are important factors which defines how the dancers will traverse and the direction (such as forward, backward, sideways). Similarly, in a design users would traverse across the interface, and the designers need to make sure that the users traverse as smootly and elegantly as possible and complete their tasks easily. On the visual front, the designer needs to take care of both positive and negative spaces for the interface to work well.

Time (or tempo) in dance defines the speed of the dancer. Dance, music (unlike other forms of art like painting) incorporates linear time pattern, which means it moves through time and space. This is an important factor for designers too. Can the user complete a task in a short time? How long do I display a notification when the user receives a mail? And, how quickly should it fade away?

In Salsa , whether dancing with a partner or in a group, there’s always a lead. The lead always aims to provide concise lead with accuracy. The other/s follow the lead; yet they have their own style and movements. If the lead is difficult to follow, the partner stops partnering him. Hence, the lead must adapt to the partner’s skills (based on whether the partner is a novice or an intermediate dancer or an expert), the available space on the dance floor and change the lead appropriately. The designer is like this lead who leads users to perform a certain desired task by understanding the user’s strengths.

Finally, one would always love to dance again with the same person if they had a good experience dancing with him/her. Just like how we designers need to ensure we have repeat users for our products!
So ensure a good ‘dance’ for your users!

Thanks to Afshan and Sannidhya for putting on their editorial hats and reviewing the draft.

How will it splash in future?

2010-07-29T08:33:00.028+05:30

When we start an application, we are greeted by a splash screen. The splash screen lets us know the software we are about to open – it’s name, version, copyright information, the people involved in developing the software, loading status, etc.
The splash screens have undergone tremendous changes in terms of graphic design. A classic example is Photoshop, a tool we designers use often. Below are some examples of it's changes over the years.

The earliest splash screen - single color, single font.

As the resolution of screens increased, so did their graphics. The splash screens introduced color and visualized the product’s features.

The rectangular splash screen changed to free-form shape, going beyond the rectangle box.

However, the information displayed in splash screens over the years has undergone very minimal change. The splash screens were ideal when computers were slow and took time to start an application. But with faster computers, which take less than 5 seconds to start an application, how will user be able to view this information in future? Or do users ever read this information everytime?

Few softwares introduced the startup (welcome) screen, which helped user to pick the task he wanted to do easily, immediately after the splash screen disappeared (as shown below).

In this scenario, do we need splash screens at all? Can splash screens do more than just displaying copyright, license information, loading progress?

With applications increasingly becoming suggestive, it’s more appropriate to merge splash screens with the startup screens. Merging them can help user to decide the task s/he wants to perform in few seconds as well as display the information about the software. While the application is loading in the background, user can decide and click on the selected option (eg: decide to open a new template) and begin their tasks right away after the application has loaded.

The splash screen can also me made social wherein it can have the following:

RSS feeds
Link to social networking tools like facebook on what others are talking about the software or share a new technique or tips
Ratings on software's features
Appropriate links for collaborative work, where two persons can edit the file at the same time

Ideally, the splash screen can have the information as shown below:

Reference:
Images of Photoshop splash screens: http://www.guidebookgallery.org/splashes/photoshop

Thanks to:
Danny Aldo, Vinay Dixit, Afshan Kirmani & Anshuman Singh for reviewing my draft work and providing relevant suggestions

Communication Design for Business Intelligence

2010-06-16T20:27:00.006+05:30

Users feel that reports are generally overloaded with information. Our understanding on the users’ behavior and mental models helps to reduce the information load and display the information in a reporting tool with optimized presentation.

The following are the usability aspects that need to be taken into account while designing information for a Business Intelligence tool.

1. Efficient & Effective Search Functionality
There could be myriad reports and data to be accessed frequently by the users and the navigation through menus, sub-menus or links could be cumbersome. For faster retrieval of reports the search functionality should be effective and efficient with the following features:

Natural Language Search:

The search component should be able to recognize the regular spoken language typed in by users in addition to keywords. This will give a human touch to the business intelligence tool. An example is shown below:

Auto Suggest:
‘Auto Suggest’ can be used in Search functionality to provide a rich user experience while searching for specific information with a keyword. A sample illustration is provided below.

Categorization in Search Results:
The search results should be clearly categorized for the users to differentiate the kind the data from images, reports etc.

Basic and Advanced Search:
The users should have the ability to use the search as per their convenience. Users who frequently access the business intelligence for reports can have options to view on a daily or weekly basis. Those users, who use the system less frequently, have advanced search options to narrow down their search results to an old report.
Basic Search:

Advanced Search:

Save Search Criteria:
For users who use a search criteria frequently an option to save that search criteria will be useful by removing the reoccurring task of working on the fields.

2. Faceted Organizing
Instead of forcing one way to retrieve reports, faceted organizing allows users to view or find a report in any way they want, with more flexible and dynamic categorization schemes. This helps in the following:

Directory Navigation:
In each step the number of categories is reduced by one

Faceted Search:
Instead of searching by a keyword, the users narrow down the search results matching the characteristics of reports. An illustration depicting faceted search is shown below:

3. Information Design & Graphical Representation
Providing visual cues will help users understand most complex data with ease and with an experience of having fun at work. There should not be a feeling that the task displayed is some agenda that is being thrust upon.

4. Inverted Pyramid Content Design
The best practice of inverted pyramid writing technique can be used for reports with a slight variation. The most important information needs to be provided at the top lines to the user. This will reduce the time taken for a user in going through the entire content of information as opposed to getting the crux of the report with a cursory look.

5. Progressive Disclosure
Progressive disclosure is a trick used by the information architects to design the information architecture in such a manner where additional content is revealed only on an action by the user. An example is shown below where the detailed information of deployable are shown in Level 2

6. Personalization & Prioritization
Everyone’s need for information varies and depend on his/her interests. Thus it is difficult to determine what a user wants from the sea of information that is out there in the business intelligence tool. Information overflow and spamming are definitely unappreciated.
Ability to personalize and prioritize the user interface, inform of dashboard or the user’s secured home page will allow the user to modify the screen based on his/her requirement and need.

7. Derivation of Action
The use of dashboard and reports are not only to display information but also to proactively inform or initiate an action which requires immediate attention. Example: Alerts

8. Exploratory User Interface
To help users to learn by doing, an exploratory approach should be used to design the Business Intelligence tool. This also helps in rectifying the need for help documentation, demos and FAQs and ensures a zero learning curve.

9. Accessibility
It’s also important to make the information accessible for everyone by adhering to accessibility guidelines. MindTree will test the tool for accessibility aiming to analyze the content, layout, navigation, graphics, etc. to ensure that the interface can be used by:
The differently abled
The visually impaired
The Aged

10. Business Intelligence As A Social Tool

We respect users’ privacy but at the same time, we are users’ are becoming more social. The business intelligence tool can now move from just searching reports, displaying dashboards to creating relationships, storytelling, creating and sharing opinions that has influenced decision making practices in general.
Reviews: Peer reviews are greatly influencing learning and decision making in users’ daily lives.
Mobile Access: Portables can be accessed on different mediums, anywhere.
Communication: Interacting and sharing through various mediums or multi-channels.
Collaboration: Allow users to collaborate in report generation and in creating a single document.

Reference:
On Faceted Navigation
http://www.welie.com/patterns/showPattern.php?patternID=faceted-navigation
http://well-formed-data.net/archives/274/mace-portal-update

Thanks to:
Anshuman Singh & Afshan Kirmani for reviewing my draft work
Madheswaran Periasamy for sharing the illustration used for Auto Suggest
Hetna Naik for pointers to Social Tool, Personalization & Prioritization
Baizal Jacob for his thoughts on Derivation of Action

Swipe To Type

2010-05-20T23:51:00.006+05:30

Swype is a patented technology that provides a faster and an intuitive way to input text on touchscreen devices. With one continuous finger or stylus motion across the keyboard users can enter text at over 30-40 words per minute. The technology can run on small screen mobile devices as well as large multi-touch LCD panels.

“QUICK”

In the image above, the word “quick” was generated by tracing the path that roughly aims to pass through the letters of the word.

The user need not be very accurate with motion in order to get right text entry. In fact, the spacebar is made redundant while Swype automatically appends space before each word. The software is equipped with fairly advanced input path analyzer and a word matching search engine along with a 65,000 words learning dictionary. Swype is aiming at supporting multiple languages to penetrate deeper into the international market.

While all this is exciting, some reviews suggest that users are unable to connect with the new data entry pattern intuitively. In case of typing repeat words, users try to remember the exact path. This is even more difficult in case of long words. Existing thumbpad pattern of data entry seems to work better because of its high affordance.

It is indeed a paradigm shift in computing and data entry methods that are in use since computer’s inception. Therefore, one will have to wait to see how the technology can bridge the learning curve and gain user and social acceptance when it makes a commercial entry into the mainstream touchscreen device market.

Tree based navigation

2009-10-14T18:47:00.003+05:30

Trees are usually used to navigate hierarchical pieces of information (Country > Province > City) or to organise information so that retrieval is easy (list of interior design books under architecture books)

While they are commonly used, Tree structures usually don't work well for cases where user's don't know the location precisely i.e. when they are browsing

For example, if you know the name of a Prof. but not sure which Department he is in, you will keep looking within a Tree Structure.
It works well for things which you know well. For example if you are looking for Specifications for Maruti 800 car tyre specifications. You know you will go via Car > Suzuki > Maruti > 800 > Tyre
These may not work for deep-information structures with similar first-level categories. This is because the first wrong choice will lead you down a complete wrong path.

Are travel agents making a comeback? - CNN.com

2009-08-13T22:44:00.001+05:30

Are travel agents making a comeback? - CNN.com: "Are travel agents making a comeback?"

CNN published a news story around how travellers are going back to the Travel Agent. The reason cited as overly complex websites with complicated options and a need to 'speak to someone'.

Few thoughts come to mind:

One Size (doesn't) Fit All: Many travel websites are designed to cater to simple straight forward itineraries. Many wouldn't offer multi-city itineraires of split PNR etc. As a result for complex itineraries and special requirements you will go to a travel agent.

Understanding Business Drivers and Value a Function will Deliver
It's important to understand the business drivers of the Website (e.g. catering to two leg itinerary with two passengers) and design it accordingly. It's important to design the experience to 80% of use and still cater for exceptions. However, the remaining 20% may cost much more to deliver. So it's important to prioritise the resources than to please all.

Personas with Context
In User Experience methodology most practioners will design a Persona with specific likes/dislikes, demographics, preferred task etc. in order to provide a good User Experience. However, it's important to consider Context in Personas in this case.

The same consumer is a different persona at a different time
Most large coporates will still operate via a Travel Agent. However, what's interesting is that if I am working at MindTree's Bangalore office I send my request to our Travel Desk. But if I am working out of our London office, I do the bookings myself (lack of local know-how and low-volume may not require a Travel Agent in smaller offices). So the same individual in a different context will behave differently. Similarly, I book hotels and flights for most of my personal European travel myself. However, most of us will go via a Travel Agent when it comes to someplace less familiar.

Trend: Customer Purchase Focus
The focus/driver of a customer's buying behaviour cycles between: Performance > Reliability > Convenience > Price > Performance. When the purchase focus goes back to Price, the Product/Service needs reinvention to move the focus back to Performance. And this what possibly some website are doing (e.g. Kayak for performance and Trip Advisor for reliability). And individuals going back to Travel Agents are moving their focus from Price to Reliability as well.

Designer proposes, browser disposes

2009-06-09T12:36:00.009+05:30

The browser wars continue. They never let us be at peace on the web. And now they have invaded the small screens too. So the nightmare continues. Every time you design something for the wild wild web, you have to check how it renders on the different browsers.

Some good news on this front. Test your web pages on different browsers and OS easily using Adobe BrowserLab . It generates screenshots of how the page would look on different browsers almost instantaneously. Currently, you can test for Firefox 2.0 (XP, OS X), Firefox 3.0 (XP, OS X), IE6 (XP), IE7 (XP), Safari 3.0 (OS X) only. Do check out the interesting "Onion Skin View", which superimposes one screenshot over another to see the differences between the different renderings. The bad news is that the service is free only for a limited time. It comes bundled with Dreamweaver CS4 though.

Another such tool for testing websites is to use an online service like BrowserShots, which generates screenshots for a web page in more than 80 versions of the most common browsers used in Windows, Linux, BSD and Mac. However, the process takes time, sometimes up to an hour, to see the screenshots.

Browsershots supports check with scores of browsers on multiple OS

More from ‘About Browsershots’ “....it is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here.”

If you have to test only for IE 6, 7, 8 only check out Netrenderer.

Well that’s half the battle won. What if you haven’t hosted them yet? What about checking files locally?

Here are some quick solutions:

Different versions of opera can be installed into the same machine if you install them into separate directories.
Netscape (6 and 7) and Firefox (0.x and 1.x) used the same rendering engines respectively. Install any two and you are done. You can run multiple versions from the same machines by using profiles. Works for 2.x and 3 too. More info on profiles here.
To run multiple versions of IE, go through the painstaking dual-booting or the slightly more convenient VM way.
OS X requires emulators again. Never tried it though.
Linux is a lot easier to run. Just run a version bootable from a CD/DVD. My favourite.

If nothing works get multiple machines. Or pay these guys for a paid service

About the small screen browsers. Coming soon.

How to create a Style Guide with ease

2009-06-01T15:55:00.005+05:30

Style Guide! what are they?
Style guides are important artifacts that are the byproducts of a well planned design work. They are made in order to provide a consistent User Experience throughout the application. In most of the cases they serve as a guide book for designers. It can be advocated that a single software/application can lead to a varying degree of User Experience by applying two different style guides for the same software. Here I will provide a view on how to create an effective style guide. Style guide creation is a good practice, we have heard this slogan many times. Now let us try to create one of these.

Style Guide Shouts about
In most cases a style guide turns to be a word file that illustrates the following aspects of a website/web application pages.

1. Real estate content area distribution
2. Types of pages
3. Branding guidelines
4. Error messages
5. Images used
6. Colors
7. Typography
8. Page Elements description
9. Other( Page Behaviors etc i.e. change of page color on overlays etc)

The style guide is used as a reference by design teams as a torch to provide a consistent user experience to its users. It guides them in knowing what typography to use, what are the sizes of icons, how the pagination should look etc.
Now let me illustrate each section in brief with simple examples which will provide a thought through to come up with style guides when you are designing the new applications.

Style Guide walk through – are you ready
Provide a small description about the style guide showing its relation to the software/web application. It will have a small description saying this style guide is of “XYZ web site” communicating its design elements, navigation, color combinations, branding etc. It will be used as a guide to design/modify the application etc. Now work on each section with a crisp brief as shown below.

Real estate content area distribution: In this section illustrate the real estate area utilization scheme. Show how the page area is divided into different sections as header, footer, global navigation, secondary navigation, add areas ETC.

An illustration is shown below (It is an example)

Types of pages: This section encompasses different types of pages the application has. In general most of the web applications have these 4 types of pages
1. Home/Landing page
2. Main Section specific pages
3. Sub section specific pages
4. Task/Transaction related pages Branding guidelines: Each organization has its own branding guidelines that should be followed. These can be the company logos, the action buttons, the color combinations, the taglines etc. The branding will have the below important elements(Its up to the designer if he want to focus more on each element in the branding guidelines, well its a good practice to know each element with respect to branding essentails of the company)

1. Logo usage

2. Tag line

3. Imagery

4. Color

5. Language The company logo is always displayed on the top left corner in 30 X 40 pixels.

Tag Line example
a) Underneath the Evo text, when the Evo text is used alone.

b) Spaced alone, provided that the Evo house icon and/or text appear
on the same page.

Imagery example
Include the images that are approved by the stakeholders for different sections. It will have different banners, product images etc.

Error messages
Include the error message notification pattern. The color combinations used to inform the user the different types of errors. It also includes the place where the error message is displayed.

Error message example

Colors: In this section include all the colors that are used in the web site/ applications etc with their hex values.
Typography
Include the different types of fonts used for different sections of the web site. It includes the typography used for main section, the content, the header, buttons, footer section etc. It should provide even the colors of the mouse hovered texts.

Page Elements Description
Describe the elements that combine together to form a page. A page element can be the icons used, the tables used, the instructional messages, the approved images etc.
Icons used example Table design
Write the specifications about the table design. This will have illustrations on the color of table and the typography used in the tables.
Table example
Table color
The table line: # d7e7ef
Column header color: #464646
Table filled color: #ffffff

Table typography
Header text: Arial , 14 #ffffff
Hyperlink text: Arial, 12 #95c0d5
Inactive links: Arial, 12 #999999

Others: In this section you can illustrate how the page behaves when an overlay is displayed. The color of the overlay etc. You can include those sections that may not fit in the above main areas.

Once I want to highlight that the style of style guides may vary from designers to designers however their essance is covered above. Hope this helps to tweak some thoughts to come up with an effective style guide.

Easy and efficient browse and search combination

2009-05-26T07:57:00.004+05:30

All of us have seen many innovative ways of searching, filtering and browsing data from a list. While working on this dialogue I encountered this problem. I call it a problem because the list of users may vary anywhere in between 2 (for an entry level executive) to 50,000 for a CTO. And every level of users would use it frequently.

For an entry level executive, the browse model suits the best. Easy to use and prevents errors. However, for a senior executive, the search model would be the best.

PROBLEM
- These are 2 fields that need to be filled up in order to assign a user to a task.
- Each field can have any number of possible values ( I get to choose between 2-10 if I am a junior executive; 50,000 for a CTO!)
- All users are uniquely identified only by a combination of Area Code and ID.
- Data selected / entered in a field needs to be validated. Validation queries the database. Narrower the search , less is the system load.
- This selection has to be made on a Task Assignment dialogue that contains other fields as well.

CONSTRAINTS
- Development on Eclipse RCP using native SWT components only. Custom components can be developed only if “really required”.
- No AJAX (or any similar technology). To populate fields with data, we need to explicitly query the database.
- Keyboard navigation should not be affected
- This form/ dialogue is already a pop-up on the main screen
- Efficiency is crucial, so a Wizard interface is ruled out. (the development teams are not so happy with Wizard interfaces)

SOLUTION
- Users know how many users they supervise. So they make a choice between Browse and Search.
- Fields are dynamically displayed on the dialogue.
- On selecting ‘Browse’, the user gets a drop-down for Area Codes.
- On making a selection, the ID dropdown is populated. On selecting ‘Search’, users gets to input Area Code and query database.
- Data is validated and the IDs populated. Less than 30 IDs, dropdown shows.
- More than 30 IDs, need to type 2-3 numbers to allow data to be filtered.

Latest trends in online User Experience Team collaboration. Are you doing this?

2009-04-06T19:50:00.013+05:30

Today UX teams are spread across the globe, accounting the facts that each individual has adopted the role of an expert. You name it, for example Information architect, visual designer, usability analyst, usability researcher etc. Have you ever thought to conduct a discussion with all these people when they are spread in 5 different countries? The possible solution is via a telephone call however what about the white board & post it notes that is a common ingredient in a UX meeting trying to find out an intuitive solution.
How will one person convey the design message? How can we understand the initial wire frames etc.

I was thinking on the above lines for quite bit of time & figured out how it can be achieved in an easy + cost effective manner. I have selected few tools that are good keeping User Experience in mind. These tools are good for team collaboration online. Some of them provide a whiteboard online that can be used to work on ideas. You can even voice chat & browse in to explain some of the usability problems in online applications.

I have created one instance of a meeting in the below link. Click on it & see the magic. Many of you will figure out the magic in the url.
http://www.twiddla.com/88239

Just give some time on each one of the tools below & use them as per your needs. Hope some of them can help you to make initial prototypes + mind maps + comments + notes etc in collaboration with the global team.

Favorite 1: Twiddla is a free application that helps to browse websites and draw on them, share files, and chat with your team. Voice chat is also possible. There is an inbuilt browser in the application that helps you to browse and annotate. This can be effectively used in drawing wire frames & prototypes. Favorite 2: Bubbl us help in beautiful mind maps that you can share with team members. You can save, email, and print your mind maps and even embed in Web Pages Favorite 3: Protonotes is a free annotation widget for your HTML prototypes. You can embed the simple java script in the HTML code. Once it is done your team members can open the web page and comment using notes on the screen. The notes can be easily moved & re sized to suit your requirement. Favorite 4: Vyew is a web based conferencing tool. No need to buy a costly account. You can try this one for free. I think the maximum number of people that can join in is 20. It is somewhat similar to WebEx sessions but allows having a free account. Try this out. Favorite 5: Wetpaint allows you to create a wiki site in collaboration. It can be effectively used as a tool to create content from different sources. Favorite 6: Dabble board helps to create wire frames, flow charts, network diagram. It is an online whiteboard where you can improve your creative skills. Favorite 7: Stixy is a flexible, online white board. It can be effectively used to create wire frames & mock ups. I suggest it to use it.
Favorite 8: Last but none the least. Google Docs is an excellent application for collaboration. You can share documents and spreadsheets and collaborate with your team/clients in real-time.
Hope you visit all the above tools & figure out which one suits your UX & collaboration needs.
Happy collaborating. :-)

Image source is from the respective applications

Consumer Psychology in a Recession

2009-03-30T14:31:00.001+05:30

With consumers being affected by the recession and market goods tossing consumption up and down, marketers must focus on strategies that cater to today’s consumer. The shopping experiences are not the same. Consumers are looking to sustain themselves rather than purchase products that would help them live a better life.

Consumers are affected emotionally. Marketing strategies should reflect the behavior and the intelligence of these consumers. In the video below, Harvard Business School professor John A. Quelch, talks about the consumer segments during the times of recession.

Video Source: Harvard Business Publishing

Microsoft Tag - Mobile Tagging

2009-02-09T03:33:00.006+05:30

Microsoft launched it's Mobile Tag.

"... Microsoft Tag. What is Mobile Tagging?: "Microsoft Tag creates unlimited possibilities for making interactive communications an instant, entertaining part of life. They tranform physical media (print advertising, billboards,product packages, information signs, in-store merchandising, or even video images)—into live links for accessing information and entertainment online..."

It's like a barcode meant for cellphone. You create one on the MS website by filling in a form and associating it with a URL. Cellphones can download a small application (from here) that reads these barcode using the cellphone's camera.

One can print these barcodes on poster, business-cards, letter heads whatever you like. The consumer/end-user may 'read' this barcode via the cellphone camera. The cellphone can then quickly connects to the internet (via the MS site) to get further information (the URL linked to the barcode)

I created one for this blog:

I remember a newspaper in the early days of Dot Com used to publish stories with barcodes and then used to send scanners to it's subscriber to help them read further on the internet :) - similar concept, but the technology has come further... camera have replaced barcode reader and 3G has replaced the dial-up line.

User Experience: Less is more?

2009-01-30T10:53:00.004+05:30

The Argument
The concept of less is more stands true for content but not for images. While providing content and navigational patterns, users like to see less to understand more. But with the case of images, users need to feel it—which means that doing more with it is more effective and appealing it is to users’ eyes.

Have a look at what Alex does with his website: http://www.alextrochut.com/. With representative images and interaction, he proves that the more he showcases, the more his users would want to hang around.

On the other hand, with respect to providing content that is focused, the less you provide, the more you gain. An example of this could be seen at the homepage of Google: http://www.google.com/.

The Judgment
The contexts are completely different. If you want users to hang around and watch you, you give them more interaction elements along with an appealing visual design. On the other hand, if you want your users to handle a focused task at hand, you might want to consider the ‘less is more’ principle.

Uniform Resource Locators (URL’s)

2009-01-16T13:57:00.013+05:30

Most of us usually concentrate on the bigger picture that solves usability related issues. Sometimes, we also need to concentrate on the small little details that help in navigation. While designing, 80% of the issues lie in navigation and who would have thought that users can find URL’s confusing.

URL’s are not just clicked, but understood.
Most users need simplicity to know their path ahead.
Trust is built when details are closely monitored.
Abbreviations are not recognized universally. But ironically, not all of us know what “URL” stands for.

Two types of URL’s come to mind:

Shortcuts that you would like people to remember e.g. www.bbc.com/weather or art.ebay.co.uk
URL’s that can be extrapolated e.g. if I know that all usability definitions are stored as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability, I can find Interaction at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interaction

The first pointer is much simpler to achieve. It is a simple configuration on the server which tells the server where to go when someone asks for, let’s say, www.url.com/abc. The latter is tricky. The factors that hinder this are:

Nobody captured it as a requirement.
A technical limitation e.g. the Content Management Server does not allow such a URL e.g. http://www.postoffice.co.uk/portal/po/jump1?catId=19300207&mediaId=26800661
It’s an application that does not follow logical structures e.g. you should not/ can’t reach the page 3 of a checkout process.
The structure of the application mimics the directories in which different solutions are compiled. And hence, you see things like MCMSWebApp or http://viv.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?EbayTime in the URL – something that can be completely avoided on day 1, but is an expensive change later.
Information can be accessible from multiple paths and can sit in multiple categories. Despite all the flak that Microsoft gets, it’s one of the companies whose products (like Content Management Server or SharePoint) emphasize on it. As an example (not the best ones), if you look at Jet Airways www.jetairways.com, all pages reflect the directory structure e.g. http://www.jetairways.com/Cultures/en-US/United+Kingdom/Products+and+Services/In+flight+Services
Another example includes http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/default.stm

The Bigger Gain
We might not realize the relevance of simplifying URL’s as it just requires clicking. But most users step into it or click on it only once they know what lies ahead. If users don’t understand URL’s, they are not going to tread into it deeper. This means that we have lost a prospect or even an existing customer. This just goes to say that the 80/20 rule holds true in this case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle.

Here is an article on this topic: http://uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000240.php

Dash to the finish

2009-01-09T16:30:00.004+05:30

And the groups are!

Sorting continues

2009-01-09T16:17:00.003+05:30

Almost done with the open card sort.

Card Sorting at MindTree Bangalore

2009-01-09T15:47:00.006+05:30

Danny held a session on Information Architecture for the benefit of the juntaa. This session also had a card sorting exercise. We thought we try our live-reporting skills on the net. So here are the picture. Its just been 5 minutes into the activity! More coming...

It was fabulous Design Mela!!!

2008-12-29T02:58:00.004+05:30

Pictures from the Design Mela hosted by the MindTree User Experience Group as part of Osmosis 2008.

Click on the picture below to visit the photo album.

Design Dawakhaana is now open

2008-12-23T14:25:00.007+05:30

Design Dawakhaanaa is now Open for Business!!!

design dawakhana

2008-12-17T23:09:00.013+05:30

Thank you all for the phenomenal response to the Design Dawakhana. Hope you benefitted from the design doses prescribed the design doctors.

Do visit this page or follow mindtreeux on twitter for regular doses of design!
questions? send us a tweet.

Shortcut Keys

2008-11-14T12:01:00.002+05:30

This has been contributed by Sachin Kumar Sharma, an employee of MindTree.

Most of the time, interaction on the internet is with the mouse. We probably use the keyboard only when we are typing in a particular URL or entering a user name and password.

There are dozens of keyboard shortcuts we can utilize on our browser to invoke functions or features.

If you know the shortcut keys, you are well on your way to working faster. But, that sometimes isn’t the best solution as it is either hard to find or we don’t know that it exists.

Remembering Them All?
There have been improvements in design where Microsoft has now introduced the ‘Ribbon’ look and feel where shortcut keys are easier to remember. This could be better without the cluttered interface; a solution nonetheless.

ReBrand by Color Branding – What color are you?

2008-11-06T10:17:00.003+05:30

Life is full of colors
Yes we all know… then what? Color branding a simple concept when effectively used can differentiate your Business from the crowd in astronomical measures. The mere thought of your pet color will make people think about your business, product, and service. There are many business around the globe that focus on color for example IBM – the big blue, Kingfisher airlines – RED, Google – Blue + yellow + red + green in its logo(It has used eye catching colors to grab attention & colors that creates excitement, fun).

Effects of color

Test takers score higher and weight lifters lift more in blue rooms.
Blue text increases reading retention.
Yellow evokes cheerfulness. Houses with yellow trim or flower gardens sell faster.
Reds and oranges encourage diners to eat quickly and leave. Red also makes food more appealing and influences people to eat more. (It is no coincidence that fast food restaurants like Mc Donald’s use these colors.)
Black clothes make people look thinner.
Black on white is the easiest to read, on paper, and on computer screens.(Most of the content on the web will be in the same color pattern)
The most visible color is yellow.
The most legible of all color combinations are black on yellow and green on white followed by red on white. Used in street light signals all over the world.

Successful Color Branding Implementers

Steps to incorporate Color Branding
When you are going for color branding initiatives then it is good to go for professional help rather than mere intuition since there are many legal pros & cons involved in it. I am not here to scare you by saying this, but a professional help will do no harm at a little extra cost as compared to the benefits your business will receive by color branding.

Step 1: Study the competition and research on the color branding initiatives they are taking. Learn the legal implications of color branding. Watch the impact of the color on the competition customers, how they respond, why they respond, how customers perceive the color, what characteristics the competition color stands for.

Step 2: Finalize the characteristics your business brand intends to showcase. For example if it is a cargo business then you can keep “Always on time”, Hard working, etc as the characters of it, again it may differ from business to business. Finalizing the characteristics is the business call.

Step 3: Take professional help to work upon the competition color branding research & choosing own color branding scheme. Select the color that you feel will represent your business characteristics. Make sure that color is not taken by any other business worldwide. Of course it is a tricky thing to do but some professional help will not harm after all the returns are huge in the long run.

Step 4: Try to use the color for the company logo first then slowly creep the color in web sites, online presence even in the online advertisement you are focusing. After coloring the online media, include your brand color in the physical space, office buildings, office buses, transport, even to the office employees if it is possible. There is a catch here you can not go out & make all the employees wear your brand color clothes if you are in a Law/Consulting firm. Common sense is the base line when we go for color branding initiatives.

Step 5: Do the color branding where ever you can capitalize it, in Job fairs, stalls, exhibitions, student campaigns etc. The whole world is open for you if you just use the stuff between the ears for color branding. The gain of color branding is immense if perceived in a professional manner.

The above steps can be effectively used to make the best profits from color branding. Again the same questions pops in your mind. “What is my Color”.

How to add value to User Interface codes?

2008-11-06T09:48:00.006+05:30

Why User Interface is so important?

User Interface is the focus point of User Experience. It is the plane on which user expects many good things to happen. User Interface in reality is the intersection of user’s tasks, his social background, technology, his physiology and many other things, which may be very personal to users. Like user is only having 500 $ in his account & he has to search a gift that is less than 200 $. The importance of User interface code validations is rising up, as Accessibility guidelines are becoming strict, more over it is important to provide a good user experience to the users.

Gains of user interface code validations
1. Accessibility: Not all the users are average some users are special with eyesight disability, hearing disability etc. They mostly use screen reader or other aids to view the pages in websites. A validated user interface becomes more accessible for the users. If he code is not validated the screen reader reads it, but not in the same order in which the page should be read. Some of the content the screen reader will skip move between lines in haphazard fashion causing many problems for disabled users. A validated code is more accessible.
2. Maintenance: A good validated user interface is easy to maintain when the code is given to third party to make any modifications or changes. Research shows it becomes a lot easier to recognize different chunks of code and work faster on a validated use interface code.
3. W3C standards: Following the W3C standards for developing the user interface codes will help the company to get a good name in the market & gain new customers.
4. Client good books: Clients value the steps you are taking to give then clean user interface codes for their projects.
5. Cheap no extra cost or software’s to buy: W3 provides the validation service free of cost. You just need to have an internet connection that is common in workplace.
6. Long-term benefits: The long-term benefits of this simple practice are enormous in terms of RIO & developing a good brand for User Experience service providers in the market.

Steps for User Interface validations
Step 1: Login to http://validator.w3.org/

Step 2: Choose the type of code input method for validation. You can validate by three methods. Each method is explained in the below steps.
· Validate by URL
· Validate by File upload
· Validate by direct input

Option 1: Validate by URL
Enter the URL of the webpage whose code you need to validate. Make sure the web page is uploaded on the internet.

Option 2: Validate by file upload

Option 3: Direct input
This option is a favorite one. Just copy paste the user interface code (HTML) in the text box & click Check button.

Code validations ERROS

Guidelines to follow
The development team should make a habit to run code validation before they submit the pages for deployment. All the web pages need to be validated before deployment. This simple practice of validation will have huge gains & above all, it is a little time that can be invested to gain a more accessible website & client satisfaction.

Approach to Software & Internet Accessibility

2008-11-04T22:18:00.003+05:30

Our approach to Web Accessibility is that of Inclusion. We believe that all websites should have a single version of the page that’s designed for accessibility rather than text-only versions. An accessible page is of value even for individuals who don’t require accessible pages – as it follows good web design principles.

A holistic approach for accessible design goes beyond template design. It needs to become part of project lifecycle, product evaluation, operational procedures etc. However, at MindTree, we divide template level accessibility design at four broad levels.These broad guidelines are detailed into a checklist.

Organisation of Content: The content across and within pages should be organised so that

Summary on top: Since visually impaired users can’t scan a page, a summary of the page at the top is useful both for accessibility and search engine optimisation.
Means to skip common content (like top and side navigation) so that a screen reader can jump to the content. This is useful for everyone.
Quick Search: Since visually impaired users can’t scan on-page text, page design should not interfere with use of Browser’s Find functionalities (e.g. some DHTML, show/hide features.)

Creative Design for Accessibility:

Avoid pixel-perfect designs as these don’t look good when text & screen sizes are changed
Use relative font-sizes within a fluid layout so that it works well even when text sizes are changed using Browsers’ native controls.
Avoid use of Graphics for labels, menus, links and avoid use graphics for small text
Don’t use colour only to portray meaning. Use high-contrast to allow better readability.
The pages should work well even without CSS.
Avoid layouts that may interfere with use by dyslexic users.

Provision of Equivalents within the code:

Use tags within HTML that enhances accessibility.
Text equivalents for all meaningful visual content – this also helps in better search engine indexing of visual content. This could be alternative text, audio captioning, transcripts, subtitles etc.

Testing with Users:

No amount of proactive planning and automated testing can substitute for actual user testing using different browsers and screen-readers. While planning Usability/User Testing include user(s) who access accessible version of the pages to iron out accessibility issues.

The Persona of an Indian HCI Professional (Salary Survey)

2008-11-03T20:38:00.005+05:30

I was looking up at the Salary Survey for HCI Professionals in India for 2006 and thought it would be interesting to look at the 'Persona of the Indian HCI Professional'.

The Persona

Is in the 26 -35 age bracket and has been working for 5-8 years. Started working straight after a Bachelor's Degree (possibly 21/22 years old) somewhere between 1998 and 2001 - the heydays of Dot Com.
Works in an IT Services company with a title called User Interface Designer [and then the survey calls the industry mature :) ]
Is self-trained and does not have formal education in design – may have a bachelor/master degree though. A degree in Product Design & Visual Comm (possibly from NID or one of the IIT) command better salaries.
Lives Bangalore and earns 5-7 lakhs/pa.
Primarily takes requirements (as told by the customer without applying any UCD techniques - looking at % distribution of 'techniques in use') and designs user-interfaces.

Few Questions:

Age: Most people are within 28 -35 age bracket. Does this mean that you don’t ‘design’ after you are 35
Probably Yes - The differences in salaries is more pronounced in early and later years. I guess this would ties into how much value can you add to your current job. And how is your current education and current job preparing you for it?
Probably No - It's possible that people who are in HCI joined directly from campus (given the dot come hype) and professionals from other industry didn't move to HCI during 1999 - 2001 rush. Hence the most senior people within HCI are around 35 years.

How well paid are we when compared globally?

It also suggest that an HCI Professional is paid as well in India as in other places in the world. If you see the Jacob Nielsen’s survey http://www.useit.com/alertbox/salaries.html you will notice that the salaries in the UK are around GBP 30-40K mark – which when multiplied by 20 gives you 800,000. This ties in well with Indian salaries of 500 - 700 K INR. (1 GBP = 20 INR in terms of Purchasing Power Parity or PPP). India is fourth largest economy in terms of PPP.

Software Solutions To Accessibility

2008-10-27T11:05:00.034+05:30

This has been contributed by Girish Managoli, an employee of MindTree.

There are a large number of web users with different needs. How do these people access information? How do they read? What do they actually see? Do they find the web friendly?

There are many types of users with varying needs:
The Visually Impaired: This group typically uses a screen reader (like JAWS) or a screen magnifier (like ZoomText). Pretty layouts, color coordination, nice looking fonts- none of this matters. They look for ways to quickly get to the content not having to wade through a lot of junk. Drop-down menus, pictures without ALT text and not knowing what a link does before clicking are some of their peeves. This group does not use the mouse. They rely on voice inputs. Any website or application that relies completely on the use of a mouse is out of bounds for this group.

The Deaf: This group has no use for sounds and relies extensively on visual content. Non-captioned videos are their pet peeves.

The Dyslexic: Controls that cannot be accessed easily, cluttered links and small fonts put this group off. They would like to have their content organized and the flow predictable.

Other Impairments: This group includes users with motor and neural impairments like cerebral palsy and multiple sclerosis. Like the dyslexic, this group would like to see their content uncluttered, avoiding unintentional clicks on surrounding links. They would want to quickly access information without having to click or scroll multiple times.

Apart from the above mentioned groups, there are others users like the color blind and the users with multiple disabilities like deaf-blind.

Accessibility is important for all of the above. The web is extremely powerful and has changed lives like never before. It brings them information otherwise inaccessible and enables them to be more aware of the world. It has made them find new interests from around the world. It has made them independent; allowed them to find new vocations and has made a whole new life possible.

Now, it only makes sense to make the web more inclusive.

Software Solutions To Accessibility
I recently stumbled upon an action program that promotes accessibility. It’s called "Scripting Enabled". [1]

The event dedicates the first day to listen to the problems faced by users. The second day is aptly called "Hack Day" where real developers get together to create real working prototypes that solve these problems.

Samples From Hack Day:
The Visually Impaired
The problem: For the visually impaired, Slideshare is difficult to use to find the text. Here’s an example: http://www.slideshare.net/AfshanKirmani/an-introduction-to-graphic-design-presentation

The solution: Easy Slideshare (shown in Figure 1), a hack that extracts and displays only the text from the slides. [2] The figure below shows you the content from the presentation where the tool was able to extract this information.

Figure 1: The Easy Slideshare tool that displays the text of a presentation.

The Dyslexic And The Physically Impaired
The Problem: The controls of YouTube player are small and difficult to access.

The Solution:
1. The Easy YouTube (shown in Figure 2), a hack that displays the video with large controls. [3]

Figure 2: YouTube vs. the Easy YouTube, a hack that displays the video with large controls.

2. YouTube does not make it easy to add captions for videos. Another hack, the YouTube captioner (shown in Figure 3), provides you with the possibilities. [4]

Figure 3: The YouTube Captioner allows you to add captions.

Tips From Developers:
• Using JavaScript to increase accessibility [5]
• Searchability of Flash [6]

Conclusion
How important is accessibility in the context of our day-to-day lives? Is it relevant to us as something more than an academic interest? I would love to hear from you.
Please leave a comment or email me at Girish_Managoli [at] mindtree.com

----------

References:
[1] http://scriptingenabled.org/
[2] http://icant.co.uk/easy-slideshare/about/
[3] First presentation on http://scriptingenabled.org/presentations/
[4] http://icant.co.uk/sandbox/youtube-captioning.html
[5] & [6] Presentations and links on http://scriptingenabled.org/presentations/

An Introduction To Graphic Design

2008-10-18T18:15:00.002+05:30

This slideshow provides an introduction to graphic design. It illustrates the growth of it, especially during the Web 2.0 age. This was presented by Viraj and Veena, our designers at MindTree Limited.

An Introduction To Graphic Design

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: graphic design)

The slideshow uses images and examples from external sources. The respective owners hold the copyright.

News in Design, Design and More Design

2008-10-17T14:16:00.006+05:30

This has been contributed by Rajesh Barde, an employee of MindTree.

With emerging content spanning across several websites, design is becoming a niche market placed within this vast world.

This week you get another interesting player in the market.

Here is your access to it!

What Are The Trends Today?
Real World Comparison
As seen in the real world, readers sip on their coffee and read content that is pushed to them. But in today’s online world, there are several other aspects like the ability to retrieve archives, the ability to categorize favorites, and the ability to make a world of your own here; this coupled with a cup of coffee!

Creating An Online Persona
More than individuals contributing to certain topics on their Blog, they find the need to create a website that does not reveal their identity. This removes bias and subjectivity in running a business/hobby online.

The Features That Come Along With It
It’s quite a thrill to see information being published that would interest a particular audience. And what’s more captivating today is not just the information being pushed forward to its readers but also the features that come along with it.

With this site, the ‘open filter’ works well as it propagates good design. Living up to your work is again a primary objective.

Targeting Your Audience
The rich look and feel of any publication or a website seems to bring in that keen interest in the audience. Especially, if you are targeting to, let’s say designers, you better give them what they want. The visual aspect of this website keeps their readers coming back for more.

Retaining Your Audience
Most websites today do have a way to subscribe or bookmark the content. This is extremely beneficial especially when you look at the competitive industry today. This website uses an 'Add to Favorites' section and also an 'RSS' feed that helps their readers keep in touch with the events and news around the world.

Tafiti’s Way To Go!

2008-09-26T10:18:00.004+05:30

This has been contributed by Tanu Miriam George, an employee of MindTree.

I would like to share a super cool website that I recently discovered. I received this link in a forwarded email and loved it the moment I opened it.

Here is your access to it!

Tafiti, meaning "do research" in Swahili, is an experimental search front-end from Microsoft that is designed to help people use the Web for research projects that span multiple search sessions by helping visualize, store, and share research results. Tafiti uses both Microsoft Silverlight and Live Search to explore the intersection of richer experiences on the Web and the increasing specialization of search.

What Makes It Different From Our Google Search Engine?
The visual feel and the interaction is what pulls people towards this website. It’s not like a conventional site where you have just one text box that is well placed so that’s the first thing one sees and a ‘SEARCH’ button very near to it. The site is capable of so much more.

The search results come up in the same window. There is also a filter that is available (like ‘search within results’ in Google).

Another super cool feature is the ‘shelf’ where you can keep all the articles that you may need most frequently. This functionality also helps you customize the site for yourself which is by far an added advantage.

What next for Tafiti?
Still in its beta stage, Tafiti is yet to grow and make its mark. But with these advancements made, this website has a bright future for itself. With clever marketing strategies and advertisements, Tafiti will gain a stronger hold.

Bringing Virtual to Real

2008-09-19T10:29:00.006+05:30

Internet-based social sharing networks are effectively catering to our need to share with friends, family and others. Aristotle mentioned, Man is a social animal. This implies that society is an integral need of a human being to survive and everybody wants to be part of a larger group of people to:

pursue their interest,
share experiences and views,
stay in touch with family and friends,
help them perform their jobs better, and
find new friends to explore and expand reach

Yet, at the same time, everyone wants to have a unique presence and identity of their own.

According to an American internet research organization – Pew Internet research – 93% American teenagers use internet for social sharing and networking out of which 64% participate in one or more content creation activities such as creation of blogs (28%) and sharing artwork, photos, videos, stories (39%), etc.

In addition to such core elements of content creation, 55% teenagers have their profiles on social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace. Moreover, 47% teens have uploaded photos where others can see them.

Where is the fun?
In another similar internet research it is evident that a large number of people go to internet just to have fun. Meaning that they find enough content on the internet to let them continue to have fun. This raises a question: does social sharing and networking platform provide us a sub-platform to have enough fun? Let me try and answer this.

Social networks try all possible ways to bring the real life experiences to digital space. To an extent they have been successful and evolving. Nevertheless, there are a few aspects of social networking which are still outside the reach of social networking platforms. For example, a guy showing a printed photo album to a group of friends, all of them having fun together by noticing their collective views, giving different face expressions and comments on a particular picture or a portion of a picture, their noise of making fun of a few pictures, their collective laughter - all that is still something which cannot be captured or shared on social networking sites. Presently, it is only restricted to a set of people remotely accessing the content published by someone on a social sharing network.

We have not made much of a progress other than giving space for leaving a text comment in order to capture someone’s reaction on a content produced by another member. Plain text including a set of smileys can communicate a lot in volume but it still cannot convey those actual emotions and expressions out and loud in public. Simple text with added icons fails to express the actual sound oscillation, loudness, expressions of people, their excitement, laughter, tears and much more.

Possibility
Internet is about efficiency as well and leaving a text comment is the easiest thing one can do. However, we need to do more to bring in the real fun. A web service or a web tool with a richer user interface which can support audio and video based commenting feature on other content in addition to text-based commenting facility would take this to newer heights.

This would allow a user to capture videos using the webcam or a small camera and the standard video capturing software installed on his/her machine. The system should automatically convert the captured video into a flash player based video output and publish it as a video comment on the original content with an option to preview information. Entire task of capturing and publishing should be made as easy as possible by adding keyboard shortcuts and display of real time progression of system activities. Optionally, the user’s other demographic or/and registration details can be made pre-populated.

In addition, the user should be allowed to upload an already captured video or attach a video from another platform such as YouTube as a comment. Similarly user should be able to upload recorded audio files as a comment to the original content. This will allow users to capture, communicate, store and reuse their true natural expressions and reactions and also increase the life of content by adding fun to it. Lastly, multiple audio and video based comments must be shown together like a multimedia playlist.

Yet, while the commenting arena is changed, as a standard practice, the author of the original content should be able to publish and un-publish the comments. For safety’s sake!

Learning From Users

2008-09-10T11:10:00.007+05:30

Witnessing the growth of user experience design, I would like to share with you an article that was published by me (Afshan Kirmani) in the Mid-Day, a daily newspaper.

The reason for writing this article was to bring International conferences like the USID 2008 to the fore. Because of communities and summits that take us forward, user experience shall eventually be a best practice followed at every step of the way.

Enjoy reading this one! Make sure that you click on the image to see an enlarged view. :)

BBC Sports: An Experience

2008-08-29T12:02:00.002+05:30

This has been contributed by Rajeev Chandrasekar, an employee of MindTree.

My favorite section of a web site would surely be http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport/

I am a sports freak and also an editor!
BBC's sports website is the best of its kind for its simplicity, accuracy of data and coverage of information world wide. We do have SkySports and EspnStar but BBC is way ahead in terms of the news structure as well as the design. If you look at their website, they have a very user-friendly interface. Everything on the web site is easily accessible. More importantly, they are the first to post any news update around the world, indicating that their coverage is phenomenal no matter where the location.

Learning about Information Architecture

2008-08-07T16:25:00.003+05:30

One of the most asked questions in discussion groups is about good references/ study material on Information Architecture, Usability etc. Here is a living list of such references:

Information Architecture:

IA Institute: http://iainstitute.org/en/learn/
Boxes and Arrows: http://www.boxesandarrows.com/ - they also have a newsletter which you can subscribe to.

Accessibility Testing: Underutilized Today

2008-08-01T10:53:00.006+05:30

Making sure that your website or application is accessible to all types of users (like the vision, hearing, cognitive, literacy, and the physically impaired) makes room for argument as this maybe the most underutilized methodology that exists today in user experience.

The Human Judgment
Most of accessibility testing involves our human judgment of how we would like to test the website or the application. This judgment comes from our testing and analysis adopted.

We need to strive forward and now make room for people who deserve to use software.

Move it!
The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) allows you to follow some guidelines that will help you in every step of your testing process. And if you do have the budget, invest in a tools called AccVerify, Bobby, or InFocus that will help you achieve this.

Looking for something free to begin with? Your best option is A Prompt.

Types of Icons

2008-07-31T16:29:00.000+05:30

While designing icons it's important to understand the different types of icons that you can create. These are Realistic, Representative, Symbolic - sometimes also classfied as below:

Realistic/ Representational: Recognizable, simplified images of an object or an action. Most of the icons in the real world are developed around this idea.
Abstract/ Representative: Highly simplified images in which the original object or action is reduced to graphical elements only. An example of showing thermometer as heat - heat does not equal thermometer. It's a representation of heat; Red = Stop;
Arbitrary/ Symbolic: are invented graphical constructions with no reference (except, possibly conceptual) to actual objects or actions. Database = Cylinder (I haven't seen a DB that looks like a cylinder)

A good reference and study material on icons: http://www.indiana.edu/~vdim/Icons/1Intro/intro.htm

Color Combinations

2008-07-18T09:22:00.002+05:30

This has been contributed by Phalgun, an employee of MindTree.

My Favorite website for finding popular color combinations- http://kuler.adobe.com
It’s designed in Adobe Flex. There is an Adobe Air desktop application to download as well.

Anything in mind? Add on.