Making better products

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

Yahoo released their new version of the popular Y! messenger with an exclusive version built for Vista on WPF. This is currently only for preview. The UX is brilliant, and this app brings more of a human touch to conversations with smooth transitions and the likes.

The app however does not run on XP even if you have .NET 3.0 and the other jazz. But this looks and feels so much like a native Vista app, including the richness and the transparencies. This new version also provides a good deal of customization, with the usual laundry list of features. These two features were extremely useful

• The Vista gadget which comes along with this IM is very useful and enables you to drag and drop your favorite contacts on to your sidebar so that you can ping them from there itself.

• Being able to switch between different people that I’m chatting with in a single window.

But the bigger question is, ‘What do you think provides more value’ - a quick and dirty IM chat client like Gtalk (also built into your gmail) or an app like this which provides a great UX.

Interesting, isn’t it ?

More available here.

Picture courtesy : The morning news

The Expression around the clock event happened yesterday in Bangalore at Fuga, a cool venue for an even cooler event. This was a global designer conference(taking place simultaneously in 10 venues around the globe) aptly themed “Design is back!” 

The event started with out with registration, Microsoft had a very strict registration and confirmation process for this event and inspite of that the place was packed with people. There were about 200 people and seating was available only for about 70 people.

The event kicked off with a keynote from Shelly Armstrong of the Microsoft Design team. Shelly has been involved in various projects in Microsoft, including the interaction design for the XBox and the Zune. Her talk was totally targeted towards designers and tips on improving UX, design, importance of keeping up with latest trends, networking etc.

After this there was a break, with the bar being opened up [:)]. There was more action ahead though. The next session was by Supreet Singh, an UX designer and Pandurang, a dev. They started out with a desinger dev duel and demostrated how Expression Studio supported the designer-dev collaboration with ease. This was pretty interesting, with Surpreet putting in a video on to his canvas and then Pandurang writing a bit of code for the play and pause functionality.

The dev, (as they put it, didn’t have much idea about UX) and hence he puts up text messages for play and pause. Surpreet then takes this XAML and immediately ports this message into a cool button.

The next part was demos - impressive stuff overall, though I had seen most of them before. The demo which impressed me the most, was the one of a Silverlight video player being able to play 10 high definition videos simultaneously with ease, and the ability for the user to seamless switch between them with no system overload.

Post this was the usual networking session (with more beers though!). Met a couple of interesting people and managed to market ADITI’s UX blog. People seemed to be very interested by this, especially because we are not a design only firm.(Thanks Ram ! for mentioning our blog in your post.)

At the end, Microsoft gave away a goodie bag to each participant. It had a 60-day trial of the Expression Studio, a design magazine and a Reebok t-shirt!.

I am all excited about attending the Expression around the clock - Global designer event at Bangalore.

The event will cover a range of User Experience (UX) technologies that will enable designers and developers to build next generation desktop and web applications. I am particular excited in seeing new demos on Silverlight and WPF and new features which are to be added to Expression studio.

This space of Rich Internet applications with Microsoft introducing Silverligt and Adobes traction on Flex is very exciting and the next few months will tell us who the real pioneer will be.

If you are going to be at the event, leave me a comment and we can network there.

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.