User Experience for Mobile and Desktops

Userfocus.co.uk has published an article about the ISO 20282 - A ISO standards guide to measure usability of everyday products. It is published in 4 parts and David Travis discusses the guides here . User focus link - http://www.userfocus.co.uk/articles/ISO20282.html Guuui.com link - http://www.guuui.com/posting.php?id=2174 - Rajesh Sundaram

One of the fundamentals in UI design is "Don't make the user think". The more he thinks, the more he gets confused. To explain this, let us take the Language selection screen in Tomshardware.com website. Recently Toms Hardware, included an option to choose languages. And a new visitor will be greeted with a "Select a Language" screen. This happens only when the visitor visits the site for the first time. Once a language is selected, a permanent cookie will be set and the UI will not appear again. The Interaction flaw : A new visitor may not know which one to click, whether to click the "Continue" button or any one of the links given below. The first line says "Toms Hardware English Website [Continue]". Also, the options "British" and "US English" appears again in the below given options making the user to think "which one should i click?" So what could be the fix to this issue? The goal is to make the user sele...

Some time ago, I was unable to use my HSBC credit card for online transactions. Most of the websites declined my card saying "Verified by Visa" denied the transaction. I was frustrated and did some googling. I found that "Verified by Visa" is a service which adds an extra layer of security. So what kind of security it offers? It goes like, the card holders should enroll their card number into this program, and the concerned bank/card issuer will send you a digital device which generates a random number. So whenever you try to make an online payment, if you select VISA and if the seller has enabled Verified By Visa for his shopping engine.. then you have to enter your card number, expiry date, name on card etc and after that you should type the random number displayed in your electronic device and then, a secret answer to a secret question. That's one whole stupid process. Many times my HSBC VBV never works, even though I reset my VBV secret question. Everythin...

How to Secure your Windows XP? Whenever you install windows XP fresh, along with the hardware drivers, make sure you install these 3 software first. Software Firewall Anti-virus Anit-Malware/Spyware/Trojan Software Firewall - Comodo Firewall pro (Free) My objective is to use the freeware alternatives. So when it comes to software firewall, I trust Comodo's Firewall Pro which is absolutely free and works like a charm. Not a resource-hog like Zone Alarm. Initially, you may feel a little annoyed by constant confirmations thrown by the Firewall pro's Defense+ mechanism. But let that be. After some days, the firewall will train itself to your applications and won't alert you. You may be required to allow the Firewall software to obtain a life-time free license. Anti-Virus - Avast 4.8 Home Edition (Free) Avast and AVG are two contendors in free anti-virus space. Personally I like Avast because it detects most of the viruses and helps me keep my system clean and safe. Anti-Malware...

Came across Camera Life's - "Help wanted" post in sf.net. The project is looking for a simple website template. So I decided to contribute a design to them. Below you can find the existing site and my suggested site design. Current design: New Suggestion : Click above to Zoom Looks better huh? ;-) - Rajesh Sundaram

Me getting more obsessed with Line art using photohop ! :-D here is my favorite SUV.. the Porsche Cayenne ! Click the above image to get the hi-resolution JPG. - Rajesh Sundaram

First attempt to trace a hand-drawn line art over the VW Scirocco. Click below to open the full resolution JPEG. - Rajesh Sundaram

Just Dial - Business Plans and Tips Just Dial.com - a classifieds website and business contacts phone service offers two plans to enlist your business info into their database. 1. Business Listing for One Year 2. Business Listing and Promotion on Cost-Per-Enquiry The Time-bound Plan 1 doesn't have any guarantee that there will be good leads generated. The Cost-Per-Enquiry model guarantees qualified leads every month. This plan operates similar to google adwords. You need to bid for every enquiry. So if a business owner Mr.A agrees to bid Rs.X and if Rs.X is higher, then he will receive the highest priority. Likewise businesses can bid for each enquiry. On the whole this is pretty much similar to Google Adwords, except that instead of clicks, you bid for enquiries. The cost involved: The Plan 1 - Business Listing for one year.., costs around Rs.15,000 The Plan 2 - Cost Per Enquiry... costs around Rs.50 per enquiry. And they ask you to bid higher to receive more calls. And yes, thi...

It was a long time since I did any cosmetic changes to my home pc. Couple of days back, in eBay.in, I came across a 80mm cabinet fan from a company called Arctic Cool. It was a transparent body with blue lighting. And it costs Rs.250 (USD 6.00 appx) . I ordered one and received it yesterday. Today was the action day and I installed the fan replacing the old black stock fan in the front port. After the connection, I switched on.. and boy ! oooooooohhhhh... that was lovely. I never knew blue fans are damn cool. Kudos to Arctic Cool. :-) My dull system now looks sexy ! That fan is from Arctic Cool which is in Switzerland. But still the manufacturing is in China. At frist I thought Arctic Cool was a taiwan company. No it is not. The susrprising thing is they got a patent for that fan. Donno if that patent is for technology or design? Anyhow the fan works cool and totally worth every penny of it. Did I forgot to mention that it has a speed controller that lets the fan to spin from 1200 to...

Google Adwords - is a paid online advertisement and management service from Google. It works as a marketing campaign tool that helps one to create Text/Image/Mobile ads and show those ads when someone searches for a "specific word/phrase" in google. The probability that Google will show the ads depends on how much you bid for a particular keyword. Getting into Google Adwords is quite easy. Adwords has one of the best UI design among todays web services. Starting from signup. Every common doubts and questions are answered right on the screen in the form of Help snippets. One doesn't need to find a help doc or search the google again. Their concept is like a Campaign can contain multiple Ads (google calls the advertisements as ad groups). For example, Nokia N-Series can be a campaign name which contains advertisements targeting N-Series phones. Now in the Nokia N-Series campaign, the campaign manager can create a series of ads viz. "Nokia N71", "Nokia N82...

It may be more than a month since I logged into shaadi.com. And today when I logged in, I got shocked to see that my profile has been discontinued. The reason? I don't know. But their alert page says : Dear Rajesh Sundaram Your membership on Shaadi.com has been discontinued due to one or more of the following reasons: * You requested that the profile be deleted. * The contents of your profile were found highly unlikely to be true. * We received numerous complaints from other members regarding your conduct. * You have used Shaadi.com for commercial purposes. * You have violated the service agreement accepted by you when you became a member at Shaadi.com. You can read the agreement here. If you have any concerns, questions or objections, feel free to contact us. Regards, Shaadi.com Customer Relations I never received any notification email stating that my profile has been discontinued. Well, what they gonna lose if they send a small notification email prior to discontinuing a profile...

Online Word Processors are becoming quite famous and handy nowadays. Starting with Google, Zoho and Thinkfree, many online services offers online word processors. And most of the them are free. Generally Online Word Processors have the same features like the desktop word proccessors, but sans some advanced features like mail merge, advanced table editing, page layouts etc. To decide the features that would make a Good online word processor, one should start with the objective/goals. For now, let us assume our Online Word Processor is capable of editing simple documents with basic features. To make it even more easy, lets say our OWP (Online Word Processor) is similar to Windows Write. Windows write a small and powerful tool to create basic documents and has enough features to do the common tasks. Building the Features For our OWP, lets take the following objectives first. 1. Capable of creating / editing documents in WYSIWYG format 2. Should handle multiple fonts and sizes 3. Create/Ed...

I am a member of Bharat Matrimony.com. Today I received an email from them saying they have launched a Next Generation Matrimony 2.0 site portal which focuses on user-experience and other enhancements. Naturally that creates a lot of curiosity with every User Experience engineer to see what is in for a 2.0 matrimonial site portal. So I logged in and.. saw a more white-spaced but the same green themed website. Certainly there are number of improvements compared to the previous site design. The new site features good-readability (keeping in mind that more than 40% of their users would be more than 45 years old parents), good AJAX implementations to provide on-the-spot responses. Simple and clear reporting about the messages (sent and received) interests (sent and received) profile completeness etc. Regarding user-experience, I believe this new design is much better than the previous one. Though the navigation and few other things like layout may take some time to get used to. This, I ...

HSBC.CO.IN's poor button design Today I happened to watch one of my friend accessing HSBC's web site. He was checking his credit application's status online. The User Interface looked similar like the image below. My friend selected the DoB and promptly filled in the Telephone number. The next thing he did was.. clicked the RESET button. And whoops.. everything got reset. He got frustrated and repeated the process once again. Once finished he carefully clicked the small GO button to complete the verification. He was apparently not happy because he ran into such incidents a few time two days ago. On that day, he accidentally clicked on the RESET button and had to repeat the process once again. Also he wasn't sure if he should click the GO button. He said that he was expecting the phrase "Submit". Conclusions: 1. The first priority or positive action buttons should be clearly visible (probably color coded or little wider and bigger). So that Users need not keep ...

Just bought a Nokia 3110 Classic phone for my sister. It has got all the features like Camera, Bluetooth, Music Player, Memory card and a good battery. After spending some time with the mobile phone, I found the music player's button controls to be confusing. The controls dont follow the standard convention and one has to get used to . Unlike the standard navigation pattern found in all MP3 players, the left and right keys represent Fast forward and Rewind skip functions. The Up and Down arrow keys represent Previous track and Next track. Nokia's engineers should have considered the standard practice and 99 out of 100 people never use forward-skip or rewind-skip nowadays. That practice has gone since the cassette tapes are abandoned. The image above shows the existing control-pattern (the first image) and suggested control-pattern (the second image). The suggestion pattern follows the standard conventions and implementing this pattern will help the users to enjoy the music exp...

Vodafone is running a campaign of some sort... promoting their customer service with the motto "Happy to help you". Some 6 digit-salary-drawing brilliant MBA's idea! I do like their advertisements that emphasizes the "we are here to help". Even today I received an email from Vodafone promoting the same thing. Nothing new but just a mail that showcases all their services, with an extra tagline "Happy to Help you". Vodafone is not a mobile telephony company, but a marketing agency. Let me tell you why... Recently I was unable to make any phone calls to my home town (Erode). When dialed from other services like Airtel / Aircel, the call goes through. But from Vodafone, my home is not reachable. I do not know if that is BSNL's (which provides telephony to my home) fault or Vodafone's fault.. but the call is not going through. Having my wedding in the next two months... I feel like I am screwed badly! One way communication. Then I dialled 111, the H...

WebHealthCentre.com is one of the highly visited medical information portal in India. The site is rich in information, but lacks a proper navigation and Information Architecture. Here is my attempt to update the UI (visually) and incorporate a better navigation. For your reference, here is the screen shot of existing site : Updated UI and IA Home Page: The modules from existing home page moves into tabs. The home page now acts as a at-a-glance view of dynamic contents (Bulletin and News). Second/Subsequent Page Model: The subsequent pages will follow the classic 3 column layout as most of the modules in WebHealthCentre are information-centric. Information Architecture - Categorization of existing modules into new tabs. The interactive modules get into Health Centre tab and information-centric modules gets into Health and Lifestyle tab. Refer the following image for the complete grouping info. Wish to see some updates of this sort to happen in WebHealthCentre.com. :-) - Rajesh Sundaram

TIBCO General Interface sounds very interesting. After downloading and unzipping the contents, I clicked on the GI_Builder.html file and the library started loading. Unlike other libraries, TIBCO offers a Visual UI Design environment (similar to visual basic). It takes some time to getting used to. Clearly TIBCO doesnt offer any "Getting started" kinda help for novices, as this is clearly targeted at Professional UI developers who are good in AJAX, JS and all web stuff. For me, it may take some more time to get into every features and find out how a UX guy can make the most out of TIBCO GI toolkit. I will post another entry soon. :-) - Rajesh Sundaram PS : When I was in vtiger CRM an year ago, we evaluated some JS libraries and TIBCO was one of the library. But due to coding convenience and maintenance reasons, we decided to keep scriptaculous and dropped the idea of appending any new JS libraries.

National Anthem is now used as a brand building tool. Now a days, Sathyam Cinemas shows a version of National Anthem which is produced by Bharathbala Productions and composed by A R Rahman. It looks more like a brand building strategy, than an act of Nationalism. After the "please stand up" card, people sincerely stand up hoping for the national anthem to play.. but the reel starts with credits that says "Sathyam Cinemas and Bharathbala productions presents".. It looks as if all the people stand up and respect Sathyam and Bharathbala. Why the *uck should I stand up and pay respect for Sathyam or Bharathbala? And why not Sathyam play a standard audio version instead of this "commercialized" version ? I am not into discussing whether the run length exceeds the standard or not. Thats a different discussion. This week, writer "Gnanee" too has voiced his concerns in this week's Kumudam.

I love Mozilla's Thunderbird... it's easy to use, quick and gels with any environment (office, home etc) and offers many features. I have been using Thunderbird from its initial days and I am soo happy with it. Recently I have started using intranet web mail which made me. really unhappy ! I wish Thunderbird offers a front-end web application version which can be integrated into a intranet mail system. The TB web app should work exactly like the binary app.. with all the features, User experience etc intact. This will make the life easy for people like me. The software-as-service model is gaining momentum and here is a good chance for Mozilla Thunderbird to capture the numero-uno position. - Rajesh Sundaram PS : I also wish if someone would write a XUL based Thunderbird clone which can be installed in to my Firefox browser.

I have been driving my friend's Hyundai Accent for the past 1 year. Mostly I drive on highway roads. Though Accent is somewhat gas guzzler inside city (return 9 to 10 kmpl avg), it gives better mileage on the highways. 2000 RPM : From my recent trips, I found the optimum speed in which Hyundai Accent should be driven to get more fuel savings, economy, mileage is 2000 RPM (appx 80kmph) , in top gear. My friend's car returns an average of 15.5 kmpl on highways. Some tips 1. Check the tyre pressure. Depending on the load you could choose from 28psi to 30psi. 2. Check wheel alignment and wheel balancing regularly. 3. The premium fuels are costly.. but do add some numbers in mileage. Go for premium petrol if you can shell a couple of bucks additionally. 4. Do not overtake un-necessarily. Calculated and careful driving saves your life and fuel. - Rajesh Sundaram

Creating alerts in Google Alerts is pretty quick and straight forward. But I found the "New Alert" button's placement in the user interface is little awkward. After registering new, most of my interactions to create alerts repeatedly ( the mouse movements, keyboard typings ) happens in the left and middle portion. And the "Create New" is in the bottom right portion. What if I have some 50 or 100 alerts? Or what if I add new alerts on a regular basis? In such cases I have to scroll down and navigate to the bottom right which is time consuming. It would have been much easier if the "New Alert" button is placed next to the "Your Google Alerts" heading. The image below shows the suggestion. - Rajesh

Was using Zoho show today in my home. While working, a thought came up in the lines of 'how will the UI look, if i add some colors to it'? So captured a screenshot and experimented by adding some jazziness to the UI. Here is my first iteration. I have applied some usability enhancements (text snippets from randon slides shown below the presentation name, better visual separation of left-side navigation stack etc, listing of slides and details has been tweaked) too. - Rajesh Sundaram

Let me upload the proposed user interface first. Later I will upload the entire screenshots and analysis report. - Rajesh Sundaram

Photoshop is a great tool. My favorite tool is the Pen tool and here is one of my creation using the Pen tool. Inspired by MAN trucks GmBH, I drew a design out of my own imagination. Then gave it a Mascot like appearance by displaying my childhood dream company name - KRS Heavy Automobiles P Ltd. :-D haha.. At that time, I never know that I will be pursuing my career in computer domain instead of Automobiles. - Rajesh Sundaram

I have started an exclusive blog ( Free Icons ) for Icons and Icon design articles. This blog will feature many of my free Icons and articles about designing icons and dealing with metaphors. Slowly I will include the icons in my upcoming new Website . - Rajesh Sundaram