User Experience for Mobile and Desktops

The Contact management is already a crowded market. Having renowned players like 37signals for web-apps and Goldmine for desktop-apps. So what would you expect from a contact management software/application? If I am the user, I will expect the following modules as the bare minimum. 1. Managing Contacts (Create/Edit/Delete/Import/Export/Plugins) Because I use multitude of web applications my contacts are partly in my yahoo mail address book, gmail address book, my Thunderbird Address book and my mobile phone. In the best case, I would prefer an app which can import contacts from all these services (via online or inbuilt plugins). Better worse (oxymoron??) , if I can import contacts from CSV files generated from above services/apps. Worse, Create/Edit option to manually enter my contacts' details. 2. Assign Tasks to Contacts (Calendar) A Caledar module with the abilities to create/assign/edit tasks related to contacts. If it has natural language processing like Google calendar, I wou...

Positioning DIV to the center of Browser Viewport Sometimes I write some JS code to prepare my HTML mockups. In this post I am describing the step-by-step approach on how to position a DIV to the center of browser's viewport. Case Assume that you have a DIV and you want to show it upon clicking a link or button. And that DIV must appear exactly on the center of the browser's window. Technically browser's display area is called "View Port". So our aim is to display a DIV to the center (origin) of the view port. How to do this? 1. Create the DIV. 2. Specify CSS properties 3. Write a few lines of Javascript code to position the DIV 4. Insert an action "onClick" to a button or link in the HTML. Step 1 Write the HTML code for the UI and enclose the code chunk with a DIV. Specify some valid ID for the DIV. For example "AddUserDialog". Step 2 A DIV element, by default will be displayed inline. A dialog box or some other "windowed" UI require...

My sister is still using rediffmail's old UI. Reason? she got used to that. And she is not comfortable with the other UI that copies Yahoo Mail. I found a usability issue in the old UI. Rediffmail displays the "From" address as link and Subject as non-link (plain text). That was a silly usability issue. Why not the subject be given as a link. Usually people read the "From" column and read the corresponding "Subject" column. If the "Subject" is of importance to them, they naturally move the mouse and click the subject. To be safe, I would say majority of people tend to click the subject and not the From address. Rediffmail makes the user to click the FROM column, and in situation where the user uses a ultra wide screen, it is damn tedious. Rediff guys, if you read this blog, please enable the subject line as links. - Rajesh Sundaram