Making better products

NetLife Research is a Norwegian based User Experience design and consulting firm. For the last couple of years they have been releasing a bad usability calendar which is meant to show examples of bad UX and usability.

This year’s calendar has great examples of exaggerated use of web 2.0 design,social bookmarking proliferation, drop down menus, message feeds etc.

You can download this year’s calender here.

Interesting way to portray UX and design bloppers!

It’s now almost an year since I started blogging seriously - blogging about work, about trends in technology, product management, user experience and usability.

It’s one year down and this is my 50th post on this blog. Not bad after all, an verage of four posts a month, a post a week!

The other I was just going through my blog stats and wanted to check out the most popular posts etc.

Here’s an excerpt

Top 5 posts and pages of all time along with the number of views

Here’s the traffic snapshot over the last year. I think that this is fairly consistent, but would like to hear from experienced bloggers about this trend line.

Any finally search engine terms which brought me in traffic, here are the top terms along with the number of clicks

Thanks for all your support, keep the comments and feedback flowing!

I was at the Bangalore startup lunch last Saturday at the NSCREL, IIM Bangalore. It was a good event overall, with participation from about 8 startups. The agenda of startup lunch was to provide a platform for Startups and Job seekers, so that they can get know startups better, their work culture and the works. Went to the event with no specific goal as a job seeker, but ended up having interesting conversations with many founders. The organizing team has a nice scoop of the event here.

Kudos to the organizing team for putting up a great show!Great job guys - Sridhar, Ashish and Pradeep !

If you are interested in working for a startup - here’s a list of startups in Bangalore along with positions that they are looking for.

If you were at the event, these are pics from Pradeep.

Do you think simplicity is the be all and end all of design ? Is it the panacea that we are all looking for ?

Quite a profound pic that has been floating around on the web.

Steve Job’s take on “What is design ? “

In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product.

PS: Emphasis mine

Jason from 37signals had a blog post on questioning your work. I think that everyone startup or for that matter any company doing anything worthwhile should ask these questions. Here’s what they propose. The image below is from Jason’s presentation at SXSW.

The above tenets make a lot of sense and it’s worth looking at this the next time you decide to start doing something.

Wow! this is quite some news. Never imagined something like this to happen.

Microsoft Silverlight, the cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering next-generation media experiences and rich interactive applications will now be available for S60 on Symbian OS, the world’s leading smartphone software, as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets.  Adding support for Silverlight will extend opportunities for developers to create rich, interactive applications that run on multiple platforms in a consistent and reliable way. This move will enable S60 application developers to use a wider range of dev environments.

Here’s the offiicial press release from Nokia.

This is BIG for Microsoft and Silverlight, as the collaboration with Nokia will enable taking the Silverlight experience to millions of users on devices which will be used everyday by end users. This will also be a lithmus test for Silverlight for ensuring it’s cross platform compatibility.

I think that is a great move, which will enable mobile users to see their applications move to the next level of user experience and usability.  I am personally looking forward to seeing some great mobile apps built on Silverlight. Some demos are expected at the MIX.

I want this blog post to be a tribute to Seth Godin. A man whose articles and blog posts have inspired and motivated me many a times.

I don’t do marketing for a living, but the things which Seth talks in his blog makes so much sense especially being in a services environment where the customer rules supreme.

In his post Marketing HR , he looks how the word “Human Resource” could have come into picture from the industrial revolution era and this I have to agree with him is quite a cruel and crude analogy, people are not resources, they are people after all.

 In the technology industry, people are the key factor for a succesful firm. Compensation for employess are mostly the single biggest expenditure for most tech companies.

Even when acquisitions happen, people look for the talent within the company to be acquired rather than the product or the technology. Simply said, in the tech industry today, it’s just all about the people.

Seth has an interesting proposition to call HR departments “Talent” departments which makes a lot of sense. Every company is looking for talent and it’s the talent that you want to nurture.

The other reason I wanted to write this post was to bring home the importance of caring about people within your company. In a highly stressed out tech industry, this becomes all the more important.

Some companies have been doing a great job at it and I wish others learn from them. Avinash Kaushik has a great scoop on 10 insights from 11 months of working at Google. I was quite impressed after reading this.

Companies in India are also catching on this quite fast and learning from their MNC counterparts, but we really need to go a long way, not just in achieving customer delight but also in achieving employee delight.

Image courtesy : here

Scoble claims to have been moved to tears after seeing a demo by the Microsoft Research team.

Something like this coming from Scoble is quite rare and this of course led to an avalanche of blog posts and predictions as to what this ground breaking thing could be. Popular predictions included Photosynth , Seadragon etc.

Scoble then came back with ‘Misreading Scoble on Microsoft cry’

One particular line caught my attention

The thing I’m talking about is NOT anything you’ve seen Microsoft do before.

And this

 That said, I think it will stand up to the kind of hype I unleashed yesterday. It is still inspiring me and I still want to get my hands on it as soon as possible.

Wonder what this could be ? Any predictions ? Btw, as per Scoble’s claims we would be getting to know about this by Feb 27.

Trying to decide on a nice restaurant for a date in Koramangala and can’t decide where to go or what to do ? AskLaila, from Four Interactive comes to your rescue. Asklaila aims to answer common questions of Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? within your city.

Currently they have local information services for Bangalore and Mumbai (which was launched a couple of weeks ago).  I had a chat with their team and they were telling me that you can soon expect to see asklaila in all metros and other major cities in India in next few months.

I think this product has some great potiential (especially going  by the vision of their passionate team !) in the Indian consumer market  and the next couple of years will determine how consumers actually percieve the real value from local products.

Below is a SWOT (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats ) analysis I did on their product.

Note : The opinions expressed here are totally from my perception of the product