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!

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.

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

This video is incredible. Don’t know if you have seen this before - but watch the lyrics - they are way too cool. A spoof of Billy Joel’s “We didn’t start this fire” (can we get more apt!)

So here’s to another bubble - Cheers!

Interesting, isn’t it ?

More available here.

Picture courtesy : The morning news

 Update : Participant registrations  for Barcamp Bangalore 5 arenow open. Please go ahead and register at http://barcampbangalore.org/wiki/BCB5_Registrations.

It’s time to Bar camp again, this time around, the winter edition is happening on the 17 & 18th November, 2007 at IIM Bangalore.

Registerations are not yet open, but watch out this space for more. As with every bar camp, it’s by the people and for the people, so YOU can play a very important role in shaping how BarCamp turns out. You can contribute in many ways - ideas being one which everyone really appreciates. For instance you could participate in the logo contest which is currently going on.

If you company would like to sponsor BarCamp Bangalore 5, leave me a comment or check this page for some of this event’s sponsors. If you are going to be at BCB5, drop me a message and we can catch up at the event.

I burnt my t-shirt last weekend. I was ironing it and in between I had to run to the door and then I got a call and thus completely forgot about my t-shirt until I smelt something burning and there was my dear GAP t-shirt with a nice big shape of an iron embossed right in the middle. This will definitely serve as a grim reminder to not leave the iron face down on anything.

This made me wonder why people never thought about this while designing an iron. This is a very common scenario - that the iron must not burn the cloth under if left unattended.

Couple of ways by which I think this can be tackled

1. Having a temperature sensor in the surface that touches the cloth to detect the common burning (ignition) temperature of fabrics so that the iron can shut itself off within a predetermined range of temperature values.
2. Detect human presence, mainly by having some kind of pressure sensors in the iron handle, and if there is no touch detected for more than ‘n’ minutes or seconds, have the iron shut itself off.
3. Have the iron automatically change orientation when burning/charring is detected.

This led me to search for some commercial products which suffice this need. Well, I did find an iron by Oliso, which uses an Auto-Lift System™ to prevent burning.

I am thrilled.

Any other ideas to solve this problem ? Let me know, leave me a comment.