Musings of a Program Manager
NetLife Research is a Norwegian based User Experience design and consulting firm. For the last cou
ple 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
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.
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 ?
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
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.
Isn’t this game incredibly cool, check the video below. Looks like you really need to know your physics well to play this one This one is from Kloonigames and runs on the tablet PC. A PC version of crayon physics is coming soon.
The user experience on this is incredible, watch how the game reacts as the user draws different figures and tries to achieve their objective. With the Wii and PS3 giving PC games a run for their money, I think innovative concepts like this one are a really good answer.
This makes me wonder about the process of gathering requirements for this game. I’m thinking, there are so many scenarios that need to be captured and then taking a call on which ones the game needs to support and deciding others to be left out. Phew ! It’s actually my dream to do requirements, scenarios and functional specifications for a gaming product. Wouldn’t that be cool
Nice concept ! The new Twitter poster from Spanish company Come and Click Networks provides a mashup of Twitter users sized relatively to the influence of each Twitter user, based on the number of followers and the number of Tweets the populars make.
These posters are now available for the United States, Japan, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Australia, Italy, Mexico, Canada, France and Taiwan, in addition to a global poster on the front page. Now this is a nice concept and goes to shwo how mashups can surface up a lot of important information.
However I wonder what would be the real usefulness of something like. It’s eye candy! yes, no doubt about that, but could this lead to a digg style user rating mechanism in Twitter ?
How do you think this can be leveraged and can you build a business opportunity through this mashup ?
Social networks are quite the buzz in 2007, with more and more people waking up to Facebook and MySpace, as they feel these networks are changing the way they manage and maintain their relationships.
Facebook and MySpace continue are leaders in this segment, and it looks like for the first time Facebook might actually be gaining more popularity.
To me, it seems quite obvious why more and more are favoring Facebook. Going beyond the consumer space, it offers much more features to the business community to network and showacse their products.
One of the key aspects of Facebook’s success has been due to their open architecture and the ability for the dev community to create apps on top of Facebook. Facebook currently has an entire category of business applications with over 227 different applications offered today, none of them built by Facebook itself. This is a new value proposition to corporates, moving from the old paradigm of creating groups or microcosms within a social network for their particular organzation.
Using the new open architecture, companies can actually showcase their products to a wide audience of engaged, tech savy users willing to use some of these biz apps in their everyday life. Life Zoho’s Office suite Facebook app which allows you to access your documents through Facebook. Their is a lot of opportunity for a company like Zoho to leverage this - for instance linking Zoho Calendar into Facebook so that you can link up your events from Facebook into your main Zoho Calendar which you use at your company.
Or probably have contacts imported from Zoho CRM, and network with these contacts on Facebook ?
Business applications for Facebook include offerings from well known companies such as eBay, Zoho, Jobster, and Blue Nile that offer integration with their home sites and data. There are other small business apps which provide To Do lists, appointment management, managing business cards etc. Other popular business apps include virtual stock exchanges, job finding widgets, and small content management packages.
But an interesting trend is that, none of these business apps have a user base which is close enough to other popular Facebook apps. Is this because social networking as a concept has not been understood by corporates or probably they haven’t realized the need for having a Facebook presence. Whatever the case is, Facebook with it’s open architecture is definitely moving us towards the “Web as a platform” era and this holds out a lot of promise for large corporations in advertising, media, CRM, and other departments in traditional businesses.
How do you think Facebook can be better leveraged by the business community ?
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!.
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