Reviving The Blogroll Exchange

December 23, 2018 General
Revival of Blogroll

Surely the idea of a blogroll has missed some of you today. The early age of the Internet after the dot-com bubble burst ushered users into the participatory ‘Web 2.0’ era. This was also the time when internet users began collaborating and sharing content and ideas through wikis, social networking, blogs, and so on. In particularly with the blogs there is a small but significant feature called the ‘blogroll’ which is a collection of useful links, not exclusive to blogging per se, but the act of ‘blogrolling‘ would mean collecting, displaying and reciprocating with links on the respective blogs. As many would have imagined this traditional source of sharing ideas and uniting thoughts has taken a beating in all the meaningless social media narrative going around, although, with some help from outside, I am looking to revive it on my website here.

The Idea of Blogrolling

A blogroll makes it easier for like-minded blogs to thrive in a diverse Internet ecosystem. The newspaper media has changed the culture of blogging by transforming the platform into a content management system but there are other individuals who utilize their blogs in delivering content that’s relevant to the specified markets. I, being one of those individuals, look at blogging as a means of connecting a majority of design enthusiasts in developing a close relationship with the principles of human-centred design, and the cultures which are being invariably influenced by the advent of technology. For me, personally, I think blogrolling would help me to connect with other individuals who believe in fundamentally reciprocating my thoughts and acknowledging each other’s commitment to their respective streams of thought and audiences. In a nutshell, it’d help to create a community, exchange thoughts and ideas, and build a rapport with the hidden world.

What’s a Blogroll?

A blogroll is a list of links provided on a blog to other websites, especially to other blogs or sites with regularly updated content. It helps blog authors to establish and build a blogger community although in Web 1.0 terminology, a blogroll would be equivalent to a list of hyperlinks on a personal Web page.

Reviving The Blogroll

Needless to say, but I was once a part of a thriving community of designers and it was the most enriching experience of my life. That reality was permanently altered by social media, although social networking alone has significantly connected people more than ever before it has also become synonymous with sharing content en masse at the cost of sacrificing privacy. It might have also affected our ability to produce meaningful content and the frequency with which we produce such content. Blogrolling aims in not just connecting bloggers but also to motivate them in continuing to publish fresh and content on a range of intellectual topics. Hopefully, in the near future, the blogroll feature would make an emphatic comeback and it’d exist on this website too. And someday we might judge our websites on the basis of who’s listed on our respective blogrolls.

Stoop Offers A Unique Newsletter Experience

December 13, 2018 General
Stoop logo
Stoop inbox on the App Store

Just like the rest, I’ve subscribed to a decent number of email newsletters, prominent amongst which are the UX Booth, UX Daily and Indi Young’s awesome effort on content and information architecture called ‘Indi in your Inbox’. Personally, newsletters have provided me with an advantage over normal news and Google or other such websites, in fetching the important ingredients while keeping the ‘noise’ out. The other obvious benefit is the delivery of content to your inbox where one could treat it like any other email and if the content no longer engages you like before you could unsubscribe it with a few clicks. The downside of this transaction is the sharing of your email, and perhaps, without your knowledge, even to third-party vendors depending upon what its privacy policy states (who reads them anyway). So while you might get the academic content you desired you could also end up with deleting or marking more spam than before. There’s always that infamous Gmail trick to filter out spam and to direct newsletters to their specific labels but it’s tedious so why live with all the hustle and bustle of technology when help is around? I am referring to Stoop that I recently put to good use to manage the surge of my newsletters.

I have reviewed apps such as Shazam & Duolingo for their uniqueness, and I am trying to categorise Stoop as a newsletter aggregator app. It’s a smart concept with the benefit of providing the user with a unique ‘yourname@stoop.email’ email and the newsletters come to the inbox inside the app. On the ‘Discover’ tab, it gives a carousel view of popular newsletters, to staff picks and even featuring publishers who regularly publish quality content, although for subscribing to their newsletter it will take you to the publisher’s web page from within the app. Basically, no more sharing your email credentials and living under the fear that your personal info could be compromised, Stoop inbox provides all the answers!

Wait Times Management For The Digital Age

December 12, 2018 Design Technology

I am involved in an engaging organizational innovation exercise with a team comprising business consultants and senior leadership of one of the top healthcare companies in Canada that own and operate over a 1000 pharmacy locations across the country. Apart from several themes one of the aims of this 3-month long exercise is to understand the barriers in the delivery of timely services to patients and finding an innovative solution to wait-times. So, what exactly is a ‘wait-time’ in the context of a pharmacy? In simple terms, it is typically that period in a given service parameter in which a pharmacy customer (patient or caregiver) has to wait before he/she is dispensed the prescribed medication and depending upon the traffic of a specific pharmacy location that period could sometimes run into hours. The current demographic of pharmacy patients consists largely of ‘baby boomers’ who were born in the 40s-60s but that won’t be the case forever because more millennials, the cohort of people generally born in the 80s-90s, have begun to emerge as an influential group not just for healthcare but the retail industry at large. This segment is most prominent for its early adoption of digital apps and automation but the ‘boomers’ aren’t laggards either with adopting a digital lifestyle. As we gather around in focusing on and exploring various options I wanted to present some of my views on tackling wait times (WT) in the incumbent age of digitization. Additionally, I also wanted to share some of my observation and learning on wait times with other brands, in particular, IKEA.

Basics of Wait Times

wait times in pharmacy

I would continue with my comprehension of WTs in the context of pharmacies. So, to begin with, what is a wait time and why is it important? In technical terms, a ‘wait-time’ is a crucial factor from the perspective of implementing the prioritization order in a customer queue to ensure that one person’s isolated need/demand does not gain precedence over the others waiting in the line. If managed efficiently on a consistent basis, WTs also play a major role in managing the working time of the pharmacy staff and also helps bring productivity and efficiency into the work culture, such as preparing the medication while the patient waits in anticipation. From a pharmacy standpoint, despite all the clear advantages, there are prevailing challenges which prevents pharmacists from meeting their stated goals. Some of those challenges include lack of team coordination and overlapping (or the lack of) of responsibilities. Then from unskilled staff to complicated digital systems and sometimes even the unavailability of medications at pharmacy locations can not only affect wait-times considerably but could also drastically lower a brand’s value over a period of time. On the other hand, it might be harder to realize but customer wait times are not just limited to pharmacies alone. In fact, in Canada, it’s common for patrons to wait for their turn while availing any form of service just that and experience levels of anxiety and anticipation. Services which have lower levels of expectation generally escape the customers’ ire from bad service experience, whereas others like IKEA have developed a robust & orderly mechanism for addressing wait time challenges using a combination of digitization and environmental factors (store). I have described my experience in IKEA in the post a little later. 

Continue reading…

Strategic Design As A Business Offering

December 7, 2018 Design

Not so long ago, McKinsey published an insightful article on the importance of strategic design in delivering business value called ‘The Business Value of Design’, it was based on a research study conducted on the design practices of 300 big corporations. I was so enthralled by their findings that I published a post in dissecting its virtues.

Recently, they published another piece titled ‘Why design means business’ in yet another attempt at defining the value of design in relation to business. However, I found this article to be a rejoinder to the previous one listing the key themes from that research study. There was one thing though which stood out for me from this post which was the definition of design as a strategic tool.

Organizations have garnered their own individualistic approach for interpreting ‘design’ based on its overall positioning in the hierarchy of the business. The fact remains that that interpretation is widely based on 3 key elements which complement each other, that is, 1) the positioning of design in the current operating model for delivery, 2) the perceived value that is derived from the design activities, and, last but not the least, 3) the integration of design in the organization’s future strategic focus. In creating a justifiable acceptance of design as a standard for building a strategic vision and in proving how companies have delivered value through this approach McKinsey has defined ‘strategic design’ for innovation in an easy to understand terminology in its latest article.

What exactly do we mean when we talk about “design?” Well, much like “strategy” and “analytics,” design is a term that suffers from misuse. Design is not just about making objects pretty. Design is the process of deeply understanding customer/user needs and then creating a product or service—physical, digital, or both—that addresses their unmet needs.

If there’s anything that the twin McKinsey articles have uncovered its some organizations which have woken up to the cadence of strategic design for innovation and delivering striking results. It’s a slow process but it’s not for too long that the corporate world would sit up and take notice and accept this new age phenomenon for innovation. ‘Design’ has the potential to bring that change.

Source: Why design means business | McKinsey & Company

PS4 HDD Upgrade For Endless Gaming

December 2, 2018 General

My first PS4 came in mid-2016, it was the Uncharted 4 Limited Edition 500GB HDD console and coinciding with the final release of Nathan Drake’s adventurous saga. I was excited and proud to lay my hands on it not only because it was my first PlayStation 4 console but it represented the ethos of the Uncharted series, a gaming experience which I had always loved and still love to this day! It’s nostalgic in some sense since I picked up this game for the first time on my PS3 in the last decade.

A closer look at the PS4 Limited Edition Uncharted 4 console. Words aren't enough. #playstation #ps4 #uncharted #design

The Background 

Despite the odds, in which I wrote a Reddit post on my ordeal a long time ago, to my utter shock, I recently ran out of disk space! I received a notification that the system was unable to download a crucial update of ‘Shadow of Tomb Raider’ to lack of HD space and I hate deleting my games lest I want to return to it in the future. However, it was shocking also because I never realised in the 2 years since owning this console that I might have played a lot many games! Then considering my older PS3 lasted out its life on a mere 120 GB without having to delete a single game, I think I might have grossly misjudged the size of PS4 games which I learned are normally somewhere between 30-40 gigs.

Since I have loved building Legos I have zero hesitation in tinkering with electronics, so I decided to upgrade the PS4 HDD and get myself some room for gaming. It did some reading to understand the technicalities and it turned out to be a simple 30-40 minute job, while the best part is that Sony does not consider an HDD upgrade as a violation of their product warranty terms. So I thought it best to leave some learning from my experience here for the sake of the future.

Continue reading…