General

Cleaning Up My Calendar And The Chaos

January 28, 2016 General Technology

I signed up for a 1-hour webinar for creating a Business Model Canvas in November 2015 and I accepted a calendar (.iCal) invite for the event from my email account. It’s always convenient as a reminder with the event details now etched for eternity in my Calendar on Mac and Google. Soon after, the organizer wrote back saying there was a mistake from their side. The platform used to send the invites “wasn’t meeting the standards for a smooth broadcast”. I thought how serious could this be. My calendar displayed some unidentified entries, such as meeting invites from John Doe, also the host of this webinar, and I deleted them steadfastly. It was chaotic and I falsely thought that my tragedy has ended here.

I’m an infrequent Calendar user on Mac. But ever since this November incident, I started receiving a server connection error every time I would open it. I only realized today that this silly server mishap had rained a deluge of personal entries from John Doe’s calendar onto my calendar entries, right back up to 2011! Apart from the many recurring meetings, there was a court appearance for a traffic offense, some haircut schedules, details on flights, itineraries, and hotel stays, dinner meetings with executives, and more. Not to mention the calendar displayed time and place particulars as well. Much embarrassing as it was for me to know such intimate information from John’s personal schedule, he would be horrified to learn about this rather bizarre leak to more than 20 participants of this seminar!

I began a clean-up operation lasting about an hour, painstakingly glancing and deleting every single entry I could find until 2011 so far. Unfortunately, some of the deleted entries would have sent email notifications causing inconvenience to its participants but it doesn’t matter to me. My calendar was mutilated and my privacy has been wrecked and it led to unimaginable turmoil, thanks to some web platform broadcast which went awry. Now I only hope that John Doe doesn’t have a long-winded career and his entries don’t go far back in time. This incident has taught me an invaluable lesson, that convenience is sometimes costly.

Refreshed Love for Mint

January 25, 2016 Design General

Mint is a super awesome web analytics tool for bloggers. For those who are unaware, Shaun Inman created Mint and you can find more details here. I have been intermittently using Mint since 2006 glancing into the web stats once in a while, but this weekend I updated the platform and the installed ‘peppers’. It’s not the usual ‘click-and-update’ update process for Mint which can seem bit challenging. After downloading the Pepper from the website, one has to upload using FTP and use the preferences to update the software. Apart from the beauty of the analytics what I also love about Mint is its branding — it’s range of associated and third-party plugins aptly called Peppers, while the place to find them ‘fresh’ is the Peppermill. This past weekend has seen a refreshed perspective and affinity towards Mint. Now, I am ‘Minted’ too.

Grammarly

Here’s How You Can Check Your Language Now

January 22, 2016 General Technology

What could be apter than using an app to check your language? Just as the ubiquitous spell check became a formidable innovation in the Word doc era, verifying your language has become a necessity for bloggers, serious writers, and students today. Personally, I need to frame my thoughts correctly to sound better in English, and always looking to convey the right meaning but there’s little help to verify what I have written. So while I was watching YouTube an ad caught my attention, and I thought let’s give Grammarly a try. I installed the Mac app (v1.4.20) and here’s my take.

Apart from the concept, my full credit goes to the designer(s) and the developer(s) working behind the curtains on creating the minimalist user-interface. Once you open the app you just cannot resist starting to type a few sentences to test it out (mine ended up becoming a blog post). Though I wasn’t confident earlier on using this app, I was anxious to lose data while moving from the ‘Advanced Issues’ tab back to my writing, but it was seamless. Moreover, if you still fear being hunted down by the ‘grammar nazis’ there’s a handy Chrome extension available on the Web Store to help you check your language in emails, social media accounts, and other online docs. It was smooth going moving to and from my write-up on WordPress Blog using this extension while correcting the language in a separate window.

Grammarly has the potential to become the next Evernote for writers, especially useful for students if they open up their premium features to free subscribers, such as checking for plagiarism and improving their word choice which is important to make posts and articles concise and lucid. You can also export your write-up in .txt format though that isn’t a big deal when you can easily copy/paste into a text editor and continue editing. Overall it seems that the approach is to give a hassle free text-editing experience with bare minimum features, even excluding the routine print option for that matter. So for those who would love to check on their language quick and easy, get Grammarly today.

Can I Have Your Honest Feedback Please?

December 21, 2015 General

As someone constantly lurking in the space for personal improvement, I have always valued and fallen back on critical feedback from recruiters and customers. This has helped me immensely to calibrate and improve my response to future job opportunities. Take the case of designing a simple résumé. I have lost count of the number of versions I have designed in order to meet market expectations and I still can’t say if I am completely satisfied. There’s always room for improvement in everything that I do, where the journey is to reach the epicenter of the issue. After all it’s a learning experience just like anything else and I enjoy every moment of it. In the recent spate of job interviews where I faced rejection I have received “positive” feedback from customers but it has been so vaguely reported to me that I can’t plan on making enhancements to anything, let alone the résumé. It only gets tougher and tougher on the mind to figure out why I wasn’t selected for the position despite meeting all the qualifications and acing the interviews.

I’m just playing a small part in the advancement of the UX/UI/Design Thinking community which isn’t particularly renowned for measuring and benchmarking peer performance in design deliverables. So a designer’s reputation is analogous to what you see in the portfolio. It’s also one of those rare fields where a person’s design knowledge on the CV or portfolio sometimes belies his/her industry experience. For example, I once proposed to hire a person whose CV was top class, but as I later found out on an interview this designer hadn’t provided a true reflection of the work experience. I brought that point across vividly in my discussions by pointing out the serious gaps in the CV, and hopefully, the individual would have taken my comments with utmost seriousness. On the other hand in this volatile UX/UI market companies would be finding it tough to weigh in on a designer’s value proposition despite conducting the personal interviews, evaluating the portfolio, etc., and the scale somehow always seems to tip in the favour of that someone special who seems to be more attuned to the company’s requirements. Is there a logic behind choosing A from B? Mostly I hear feedback for the refusal as not being a “cultural fit” for the company. But what exactly does that mean and how does one work to improve his/her chances in the market? Why was the strong candidate overlooked for a “better” one? What has made the other person more promising than me? It’s almost difficult to get any straight answers from recruiters later once the rejection call has been made.

For a multitude of corporations the painful job of sifting through the CVs culminates with finding the perfect candidate but what’s also needed is to provide a strong and honest feedback to the ones who did not make it to the finishing line after the interview round. The uphill task for a candidate to find gainful employment unfortunately does not end with the selection process. Particularly in today’s IT world where software designing has become so complex that each company has specific goals for individual UX positions, this is where I believe an honest exchange of critical insights is very crucial for not only designing better products but also for sustaining in-house design talent. From my experience I can tell you that designers thrive on honest feedback, it’s their bread and butter. So again, what are your thoughts on why the candidate did not make it? Was it the individual’s work or lack of communication skills or something more pertinent? There’s a need for a mechanism to voice your opinion on a personal level.

As far as hiring decisions are concerned, how about developing an HCM sytem to better judge the (design) capabilities in conjunction with the actual effort by combining a person’s inherent characteristics with the company objectives, and presenting a true personality account of the individual. You might have a ‘Yes/No’ answer right there. While nothing’s written in stone so far as humans are concerned and there will be gray areas from software analysis which can be evaluated independently by the SMEs. But connecting the dots by introducing rationale into the hiring process may allay fears within the industry to engage with the wrong talent in the first place, encourage recruiters to contribute with their feedback honestly and dynamically, help job seekers to gain valuable insights into their causes of rejection, and so on. Let’s hope we can continue with this debate until we find the answers.