Where your apple taxes go

One for the apple fanboys! Love this one.

The Wall street meltdown

Nice video which captures the Wall Street meltdown, now we do know who started the fire

Remixed version of Billy Joel’s fame “We didn’t start the fire”.

Startup strategies for handling the economic downturn

The slide deck below from Sequoia Capital is some solid advice about dealing with the entire economic crisis and recession from a startup standpoint. If you are an entrepreneur in any part of the world, I am sure there’s something useful for you in this deck.

In fact, the slides below give a good synopsis of the entire problem in the US and global markets and the effects which they have had on the global economy and how startups need to deal with new challenges and realities. I especially like slides 46-55, which are strategies which startups can adopt to get past the tough times.



What do you think ? If you run your own startup, what’s your strategy in dealing with the tough times ?

DCamp Bangalore 2.0

Design Camp 2.0 bangalore is all set to happen on the 26th July, 2008. This time it is being hosted at ADITI along with the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA). To participate in the event you can register on the wiki from here.

Date : 26th July, 2008. 10 AM onwards.

Location : Aditi Technologies
224/16, Ramana Maharishi Road, Sadashivanagar, Bangalore – 80

DCamp is an unconference focused broadly on design and user experience community. It is open to everyone interested in the topic: designers, usability practitioners, developers, marketers, entrepreneurs, and other audiences.

We already have close to 50 registrations with very interesting speaker slots. If you wish to speak at the event, sign up for a speaker slot on the wiki.

If you have any interesting ideas for the event or wish to have discussions / BOF sessions around specific topics, leave me a comment or call me on 98866 38995.

See you there!

Bad Usability Calendar 2008

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!

What’s your design ?

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

Learning from 37 signals

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.

Of tears and Microsoft !

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.

asklaila – India’s local information service

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

The six disciplines of User Experience

As envisioned by Donald Norman and inspired by his book “The invisible computer“.
The following skills are required for building the best user experience into a product (could be any product from hi-tech to manufacturing)

1. Field studies – Observing potiential users doing their tasks in their normal settings. Skills require careful and systematic observation and usually come from the fields of anthropology and sociology.
2. Behavioral designers – People who create a cohesive model for the product based on a detailed task analysis of the users. They mesh the task requirements with the skills and capabilities of the intended users and this model becomes the basis for engineering design.
   Skills required for this come from the cognitive science and experimental psychology.
3. Model builders – People who rapidly build prototypes and product mock-ups that can be tested even before the real technology is ready. Skills for this usually come from people with a designing and programming background (information architects) and architecture and industrial design.
4. User testers – These people are usually involved in performing usability and feasibility studies. Through rapid user-testing studies , they enable to iterate through designs in order to meet the real needs of the users. Skills for this come from experimental psychology.
5. Graphical and industrial designers – At this stage, the aesthetics of the product are brought in through people who have experience in graphical and industrial design, and the “joy” and “pleasure” of using the product come into picture. Not only must the product designed merge the conceptual model and behavioral aspects but it must also meet varoius requirements of technology. These skills are usually brought in by people from schools of art, design and architecture.
6. Technical writers – The goal of these people should be to show the technologists how to build things that do not require manuals. However in the real world scenario, they are usually brought in after the product is built and are asked to write usage manuals. The technical writers should be able to understand the audience, what the intended users require of the product and how they can go about getting their tasks done through the product. The technical writers should be an integral part of the development team, so that the product is built so well that no instruction manual will be required.

So here’s the deal, in a typical technology product, there is no luxury of time to go about doing all the above mentioned steps and in many cases some of the steps can’t be executed because the target audience characteristic is too far and wide.

What do you think is the best model that can work for a typical web based application scenario in order to make sure that the real needs of the user are met ?