Design

Retro is Back

RetroGalI had always liked retro figures right from my earlier website and I had also got some good reviews regarding the same. I decided to move away from it because I wanted to try out something different. Now that the earlier design has outlived my expectations it was time for a new set of rules.

Firstly I had to re-install WordPress on my local machine which wasn’t as tedious as I initially thought it would be. Installing it offline meant that I can carry my design development on WordPress without disturbing the original website. For those of you who are interested in knowing more about it, click here. I had always had a colour scheme in my mind which was more youthful then it’s previous avatar and I just had to build a theme around it. The RetroGal – as I like to call all my retro figures, is also back on the header. The entire development took me just over a day & the end result was very satisfying. I hope this small change would enhance the user-experience to a great extent.

Move Over Konfabulator

Here comes Kapsules, a freeware desktop widget engine built exclusively for the Windows system. It is built upon the Windows Scripting Technology and is reliant on the .NET framework for it’s working. While Konfabulator was earlier written for the Mac OS X System and later ported for Windows, Kapsules is exclusively designed to be used by Windows components. Check out the widgets available for Kapsules and also preview the Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets.

Aperture Launched

Apple ApertureThis would be the greatest revelation as far as I am concerned. All this while I was feeling proud about Apple not succumbing to the market gimmicks of using Flash on their website. They have a novel way of seeking aesthetic value even in the most simplest of things. The fact that Apple was not using Flash anywhere across their website was a very challenging thought in itself because it was able to achieve good results without using the SWF technology.

Not any more. Apple has just launched it’s new software called Aperture and has used Flash beautifully on the official website. The black colour lends a certain entertaining aura, much to the liking of any photographer. If you are a designer and you want to see aesthetics marry usability then visit Apple.com.

Usability Workshop – Concluding Day 3

Bhooshan with Hemal Gathani from HFIThe last day was good in the sense that we got to learn a few concepts about accessibility, internationalization (better known as ‘l18n’), localization and globalisation of websites. The idea of localization is quite exciting wherein one develops websites for an audience of a particular country or region. Coke for instance has developed local websites for India, Japan, Nigeria and UK and all the websites, despite maintaining the branding value of Coke looked different in their content and visuals. They were appealing more towards the local audience of that respective country.

Since today was the last day of the seminar, we had bought out cameras and were merrily clicking some of the final moments of the day and jotting down each others email IDs. Let’s hope we write to each other frequently and discuss the usability problems which we face in our everyday lives. Also it was time to revisit whatever we did in the past days and a short paper was given to us to solve. Aadesh and myself spent some time with Hemal discussing some websites and the future of usability engineering. This technology, as we all agreed has already found its roots in India and in the coming days more usability engineers would be required to support the IT industry. Meanwhile I had a wonderful at Pizza Hut where Aadesh and I have been going everyday after the seminar gets over. Later also went to Planet M to pick up some DVDs of my favorite Hindi movies – Dil Chahta Hai and Hum Tum.

As a parting gift we all decided to stay in touch by starting a group on YAHOO! Groups. I would be happy to moderate such a group which would look at usability objectively. At present though I am thinking about what to call it. Suggest something in the comments if you can :-)

Usability Workshop – Day 2

The day was supposed to have been a lengthy one. Some of the outstation participants had to go early tomorrow and hence a huge chunk of the portion had to be completed today. Today’s topics were quite interesting – Writing Content for the Web, Typography, Using Web Controls, Design for Web Applications, Use of Graphics and Colours. The discussions are always conjoined with an exercise and it helps to remember things. We also take time out and review some website in conjunction with whatever is being taught currently.

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