The official Google Blog carried the announcement of their new project called Knol. The aim is to encourage writers to contribute articles of significant importance and share it with the internet community, in what seems to be a head-on challenge to Wikipedia.
Design
UMO '07 – A Retrospective
I had promised to keep you guys posted from Hyderabad but some things did not work out as I had planned. The data card didn’t work and I was left (fuming) without an internet connection. To make my matters worse, my camera stopped working and I could not take pictures from the event.
Back to the story. The conference was being held in the spacious environs of the Indian School of Business (ISB) in the Khemka Auditorium. The scheduled start was 8:30 am but it got delayed and finally kicked-off nearly 2 hours later. When we reached the place early morning, the banners were not yet displayed and we were completely lost. The chief guest for the event was Ravi Pooviah, my long time idol and a professor from IDC-IIT. This year UMO (Usability Matters.org) was exploring the theme of health innovation and therefore the guests from medical to software industry were offered an opportunity to showcase their work in that field. Amongst the presentations Parmeshwar Raju’s lecture on Designing through a grid layout and Anirudha Joshi’s slides on devising User-experience metrics were found to be most interesting. I also enjoyed Shruti Agarwal’s discussion on SMOKEDOTE, which is an interactive game for smokers. The design of her slides was very creative indeed. Shruti’s a senior Visual Communications student at IDC-IIT.
The action for the next 2 days shifted to the Abridge Solutions’ training center where the Track I and II workshops were to be held. I had opted for Track I and Ravi Pooviah’s class on Information Visualization. It was the most fabulous experience for me and we were given in depth information on the basics of design and evolving concepts through the mind mapping exercise. On the sidelines, I had a long discussions with Ravi on the future of design and the education system in India which prevents raw talent to be recognized and instead considers the marks system to be the final judging factor. It’s a topic for another article from me so I will stop here. Overall, the experience of attending this event was good and looking forward to applying the knowledge at my work place soon.
Frequent Blog Posting is Irrelevant Today
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.
Ideas on a UXD Framework
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.
'Touch' Your Next iPod Now
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.