Posts filed under 'Design'
Through my daily routine of sifting through the articles on blogosphere, I came across some nice links which I would like to share with you. The first one is written by Eric Kintz (VP Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence for Hewlett-Packard) — he writes about the frequency of blogging and why it should be avoided and rubbishes the idea that frequent posting is a formula for generating traffic and further goes to say that it drives poor quality content. Here’s an interesting fact that he serves in his article - “25 million readers visit Wikipedia every month, but the number of people who actually contribute content to Wikipedia is about 1-2 percent of total site visitors”.
Read the entire article here. And no…I am not posting this link to increase my site traffic.
The second article is by Seth Godin and he outlines 10 principles (or should I say the Ten Commandments!) for creating a “great website”. I liked the very first point that he makes - “Fire the committee. No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people. Not one. This is a dealbreaker”. I second those thoughts completely. Check the article here.
Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, seth godin, eric kintz,
October 12th, 2007
Writing for an internal global initiative on Innovation, I spoke about imbibing a user-experience design framework (UXD) in the software development life-cycle (SDLC) that can consistently deliver better products. I am publishing the article here.
Designing a UX framework for Internal Applications
User-experience (UX) design deals with harnessing the feelings of a user — How people feel before, during and after they have used a product. It pertains to creating an interaction model that impacts a user’s perception of a system or a product which makes it more desirable for use again. Being a subset of UCD (user-centered design), the first step towards evolving an internal UX methodology is to understand the requirements and user-needs through research.
The User is King
Numerous internal applications are required to be accessed by users on a daily basis. Surprisingly, while the process intended for the greater organizational good is in place, a framework that can monitor the outcome in delivering the right experience to the end-user is missing. Consequentially users get turned-off while conducting simple tasks–either the session gets expired without warning or users are not allowed to recover from their errors. A reason for this is the narrow focus of our design efforts on the end-user’s vision of goals – incapability of internal teams in understanding the user’s mental model including time spent in completing tasks and the prioritization of the goals minimizes the efficiency of the interface and relevant technology. Shaping a central mechanism that comprises of UX design specialists to analyze the user activity (recording success and failure rates), gathering feedback from the end-users (understanding tasks and priority) and working continuously to re-model the user-interface (ensuring it matches user-goals) should be encouraged. Other factors like allowing users to choose the relevant content for their needs – a variant of the Web 2.0 theory – would help in improving the overall credibility of the system.
The Benefits
The better the UX of a system – less mental efforts, less mistakes — the more enthusiastically users are likely to visit it often. Key organizational activities will get deeper visibility due to the rise in visitor loyalty. In turn, an UCDian approach will bring clarity to the project — fewer U turns, management support and less time wasted, which would bring down costs and timescales. A good user-experience is a sign of a good product.
Technorati Tags: usability, user-experience design, interaction design, hci, ux
September 13th, 2007
Ever since the rumour mills were working over time, I had been waiting eagerly for the news about
Apple’s new, much hyped iPod. There was a market speculation on the introduction of a touch-screen iPod which added to the frenzy. Yesterday THAT speculation turned into reality when Apple announced the iPod Touch alongwith upgraded versions of the other family members. My reactions are mixed for now.
The iPod Touch will have the same features touch-screen as the iPhone — infact it looks the same as well. Additionally it carries WiFi capabilities, so users can connect to the net with Apple’s own Safari browser. Apple has signed up with Starbucks to offer the iTunes WiFi store on your WiFi enabled device. With the revolutionizing iPod Touch, Apple has ushered into a new segment of innovation — MP3 players being ported with wireless capabilities to connect to the internet. In my opinion, this version of the iPod will go down well with individuals who haven’t had a first-hand experience of the iPhone since the similarities cannot be ignored. But the Touch is available in only 8 and 16GB models which is sad news for those expecting something ‘big’ from Apple. In my opinion, the offer of owning a touch-screen iPod with more storage space, would have looked more appealing.
The iPod Nano has also undergone changes including a bigger screen display and it can play videos too. Frankly it no longer sports that slim ‘pencil’ appeal anymore, rather it looks like a squished version of its big brother — who just got bigger! the iPod is now called ‘Classic’ and has been upgraded to 160 GB (yay!). The design looks much sleeker now, with accentuated curves all along. The decision of going for a path-breaking touchscreen iPod with less storage or a 160 gigs iPod Classic, would be a tough one to make.
Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, iPod touch, iPod Classic, iPod Nano, iTunes, WiFi, iPhone, Starbucks
September 6th, 2007
Being a designer myself, I have been fascinated by the use of various colours across different media - the web is of particular interest for me. If used judiciously, you can create wonders with a family of colours; a palette or scheme of complimentary colours. You must visit
ColorLovers to see what amazing stuff the community is creating back there.
This set me off on a mission to search how palettes could be devised from pictures which can be ultimately used in my daily artworks. After scouring the net endlessly, I found an answer right in my backyard. I have Photoshop CS2 and I am detailing the steps below for those of you interested in knowing the secret. Remember, the fundamental idea behind this exercise is to convert natural colour shades digitally to use in our medium of choice (print, web, fashion, etc.).
Step 1
Select a picture of any format and open it in Photoshop CS2 (I experimented on JPG format and it should work on other formats as well). I find images of natural surroundings quite interesting because they have the right colour combinations but make your own choice.
Step 2
Unless you change the colour settings to Indexed Colour, the palette won’t be created. So next we go to Image › Mode › Indexed Color and provide the following settings for the options:
Palette - Local (Perceptual)
Colors - 128 (you can fill 256 to give you 256 colours)
Forced - None
Transparency - Keep it Unchecked
Matter - None
Dither - None
Press ‘OK’ now. Your image will become patchy and is now converted to Indexed Color.
Step 3
Go to Image › Mode › Color Table and Voila! you can see your color palette created from the selected picture. You can save it on your harddisk by choosing the appropriate format (I prefer the *.ACT format). To use this in your artworks, you can load it from Edit › Preset Manager and select Swatches or Windows › Swatches › Load Swatches from the options. If you want the Hexadecimal values of each of the swatches, just roll-over it and you can see it as a tooltip.
Do let me know your results. Enjoy and Happy Colouring! :-)
Technorati Tags: photoshop, colour, swatches, palette
August 16th, 2007
I was pleased to hear the good news that
Apple launched their
Safari browser for Windows XP and Vista. I am surprised but happy that the Windows version has finally arrived. Does this mean the beginning of the end for its closest rival
Firefox? we’ll have to wait and see.
Not amongst those willing to wait, I have installed Safari and I am writing this blurb from it. You can get the latest Public Beta 3 from this place and have fun!
Technorati Tags: Apple, Macintosh, Safari, Leopard, Firefox, Microsoft, Windows XP, Windows Vista
June 12th, 2007
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