UX

New Reads

2008-02-29T10:54:00.001-08:00

Just put down my copy of 'Designing the Obvious'. Its a great book for beginners and also has a thing or two in store for people who have been walking down the UX path for sometime now.
Will now start reading 'Design for Non Designers'...
An interesting conversation at work today. The tech team was reviewing my designs for tech feasibility. I had suggested an 'information on demand' pattern in a couple of places, where the extra information appeared inline on the same page instead of directing the user to a different page or popup [Inspired from rhj's inline FAQs - Designing the obvious]The tech team's contention was that I should move it out to a different page as it increases the coding effort for that one page, but they cannot quote such a high estimate for a single page...
Obviously, the core dev isn't familiar with the component level estimation paradigm that the industry is now embracing post the AJAX revolution, so another turf war in the calling...

Yay! New look for the blog!

2007-11-30T08:53:00.001-08:00

Back in the US now, been flirting with dandelife.com for sometime now, but that doesnot let me experiment with these fancy web widgets [i just added a recaptcha for my mail at the bottom of this page], so its back to blogspot.
This was a good time, I got to do some serious affinity diagrams, personas etc. Also, as usual, took the opportunity to add some wonderful books to my IA kit
- My usability bible, Contextual Design - Holtzblatt and Beyer
-Designing the obvious - Robert Hoekman Jr
-Design for Non Designers - Robin Williams

While I have read the COntextual Design book many times, it has always been a borrowed copy. I have been wanting to get my own copy for quite some time now, and its going to be used rather frequently.

I am reading Designing the Obvious currently, watch this space for a review real soon...

hmm - rainy sunday afternoon

2007-06-23T22:52:00.000-07:00

Its a rainy sunday afternoon and i decided to drop by, for the sake of old times. A few rants first.
1. Information overload is here...ive got 3 books to complete reading, plus a thousand blogs, websites, youtube - the list keeps growing. Unfortunately, time is not an elastic entity.
2. Broadband connection. MTNL, it has been so far. Was pretty good till about four days back when it suddently decided to go beserk. There would be five minutes of acyual connectivity in an hour. Today has been better, but the unpredictability scares me.
3. As an information architect/usability analyst - there's the world out there waiting to be discovered. I have hardly touched the surface and knowing how much there is to know, thrills me and scares me at the same time. Pretty UIs are the last things girrl!

OK - now for some good reads:
1. Mythical Man-Month - Examples are dated, but the concepts hold good to this day. Will add to your ammunition when dealing with a difficult project manager, and help you if you are the project manager.

2. Thoughts on Interaction Design by Jon Kolko - Practical, to-the-point, humourous

3. Interaction Design Patterns - Jenifer Tidwell. Need I say more?

ugleah.com - enjoyed reading the examples, and the presentation on paper prototyping.

Google reader - had discovered it sometime back, now that bloglines is officially websensed - have reverted to it once again.

Nuff for today. Have decided to update this blog more frequently...

Designing for 90%

2007-06-02T22:39:00.000-07:00

Wanted to check this out at the Cooper Hewitt Musuem, but as luck would have it, its closed this sunday:(

http://www.cooperhewitt.org/VISIT/

Askville - An alternative to Google?

2007-03-24T05:22:00.000-07:00

Had a chance to check out the new 'Ask Me' service launched by Amazon - Askville.
Google failed me when I was trying to fing Hindi numeral names from 1-50 for Mishti, which is when I posted a question on Askville. Bingo! In the next 10 mins, I had not one, but two sets of URLS to follow, and pretty accurate at that. The person who answered goes by the name of EddieNygma, and has answered diverse questions ranging from 'opinion on the best in permanent adhesives' to 'finding prints by Brian Andreas' and everything in between. All in all, this person had 35743 quest coins at the last count - one for each question answered...quite sometthing!
So curiousity piqued, I posted a second query about adding a dropdown in an excel sheet - and again within 5 minutes, I had an answer, albeit not a very good one, for it was the standard excel help text that I couldnot comprehend in the first go.
Success of Google search result depends on the accuracy of the query - but when there are humans at the other end interpreting your search queries, it can be pretty awesome!

Blogging after a long time!

2007-03-23T05:25:00.000-07:00

Hmm - Its been a busy month or two, coupled with no internet access. SO after a period of mind numbing work, am back for a spin in web world.
After hearing a lot of positive feedback on the new Yahoo Mail, decided to see ot for myself. Yeah, and came back absolutely inpressed. Right from the demo widget to the MS outlook interface. Although, I am a bit used to having mail grouped by conversation, eager to give this a try.
Another fave site ok-cancel.com seems to be hibernating, so caught up with the cartoon strips I had missed reading earlier.

Ashish passed me this link yesterday
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/
Hmm, wonder how I missed that...trouble keeping up with the latest trends.But seriously, that IS the logical next step.
Ashish was laso raving about the single number service offered by www.grandcentral.com
Amazing concept, especially when you are paying for incoming calls.

This is my current list of daily fixes:
techcrunch.com
Digg.com
del.icio.us
bloglines
boxesandarrows
orkut.com

Hmm, when did rediff and msn get knocked off from this list? Real 'News' don't matter anymore?
Gmail

Websense and Broadband

2007-01-13T09:19:00.000-08:00

After having a completely free rein of internet in Delaware, I am back in Mumbai now, and back to reality. Thud. The Mumbai office is heavily websensed-the websensed categories include the company name, what more can I say.
Anyways, so that means no IMs, no sites that fall under Finance, Travelling, Shopping, Entertainment, Social Networking, yadda yadda. Even checking emails is a pain, cos every other page takes you back to the 'blocked' message.

I shifted home a year back, and getting broadband was always on the to-do list. I had been pretty casual about it so far, as the places I worked with so far never really had a 'policy' regarding internet usage. And ofcourse, as a usability engineer/web developer, the internet was my playground.

All that changed when I got back to office this month, and therein began my hunt for an ISP who would give me broadband. The ISP of choice, Hathway, refused connection to my building-cable guy monopoly! MTNL, has this rule, where your application gets cancelled automatically if you are not available when the friendly-phone-guy drops in. So the form I had filled last october had been anulled even before I knew, and it took me a year and a half, inspite of living in the financial capital of the happening IT place that is India, to get a broadband connection.

Anyways, hopefully, the wait has ended. The connection is pretty fast, and all that I need to know now-is how much it will cost me EOM. Will keep you posted. Till then, happy surfing!

Googling Prachi Sakhardande

2007-01-09T02:55:00.000-08:00

I just googled myself and got a few interesting results:

http://pms.rediffblogs.com/ (Didnt know it existed!)

A link to my linkedIn profile (never used it ever - I am a true-blue orkuteer)
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/1/623/a94

Some recipes I had put online, eons ago
http://www.bawarchi.com/contribution/contrib3532.html

Strangely, blogger, flickr and orkut are nowhere on the list. Why?

IAs on the go

2006-12-26T10:56:00.000-08:00

I am digressing from the topic.

We as information architects, need to travel quite a bit. Here is a list of items that I have collated as a ready reckoner for friends travelling short term:

While travelling:
1.A light jacket
2.A book
3.Granola Bars/chocolates if you are like me, and hate airline food

For the winter:
1. Boots
2. Closed formal shoes
3. slippers for home
4. Woollen socks (min 2 pairs)
5. Gloves (woollen)
6. Gloves (thick rexin)
7. Moneky cap
8. Woollen scarf
9. Thermal full sleeved upers. Make sure they are long enough to reach the waist of your trousers
10. Thermal lowers
11. Moisturiser
12. Lip balm
13. Vaseline for chapped feet
14 4-5 pullovers
15 ezee to wash pullovers
16 A long jacket
17 windcheater
18 umbrella

With the renewed security measures at the airports, avoid carrying sprays and lotions in your carry on baggage. They'll get thrown away during security check ins.

Creating wireframes in excel

2006-12-18T12:00:00.000-08:00

Every information architect needs a tool to document her thoughts into a set of tangible wireframes. While a pencil and paper may serve the basic purpose, as a consultant, you are definitely expected to provide a deliverable slightly more professional than the rough paper sketches, that most of the time only you can understand.

I started making wireframes using word, though I remember doing my very first project in visio. I was never too good with word, pathetic actually. My tables would routinely crash, textboxes would float all over the place and the stylesheets and auto numbering was a nightmare!

So regrettably, rather than concentrating on the design, I was putting more effort trying to understand the medium. Colleagues offered to share their tips and tricks, but each of them had a set of whimsical rules that seemed to work only for them, never for me.
There was a time when I had developed a phobia for creating wireframes, I was ashamed of how disgusting my work looked.
At around this time, I happened to drop by a colleague with some great design ideas that I had for a project we were working together on. He offered to wireframe the ideas for me, and...he started excel.

The first thing was to select the entire sheet, by clicking the top left corner and filling the sheet with white color. As good as a blank drawing sheet.

Step 2 was to break each label, each field element into a textbox. With borders, without borders, fill effects, gradients and voila! you have a wireframe that looks as good as the design idea that its supposed to convey!

Ever since, I have been hooked on to the idea of using excel to create wireframes and it has certainly made my life easier. The field elements don't tend to go awry as they do in word, the application is definitely more robust, you have a decent canvas to draw up your wireframe and with a little bit of playing around, there's nothing you cannot do.

Oh, and did I mention the copy-paste of images that is such a pain in word is a breeze in excel. Your image will get pasted at the exact same spot that you wanted it to be pasted - again, unlike word, which sometimes seems to get a mind of its own.
And here's the best part. You never have to worry about indexes and tables - just color-code the tabs on the worksheet and you wont have to scroll up and down between a 300-page document!

Happy wireframing in excel, everyone!

Nostalgia on the Net

2006-12-13T18:44:00.000-08:00

It's wednesday today, can't wait for the week to get over. After coming home from work, I generally get online to check mail, surf around. Sometimes you do find gems online. Like this site that captures a lot of nostalgia from the 80s when we were kids. They actually have scanned adverts that appeared behind Tinkle and Indrajal comics, and a whole made-up Giant Robot story thats quite funny really!
http://www.vishalpatel.com
digg it!

And there was this community I found on Orkut called 'Bombay'. This one has an interesting thread about people reminiscising about the Bombay I grew up in, right from the Goldspot jungle book cap collection contest to the escalator at Chowpatty. Its like reading the memoirs of a generation! If you are a fellow orkut-er, check this out -
http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=972

Happy Viewing!

The Games They Play

2006-12-12T19:20:00.000-08:00

So it's finally dawned on me:
- I am registered in blogger beta
-I must enter my google login id and password to enter (though it doesnt say that anywhere)
-If i try all sorts on wrong combinations, it tires of playing games with me after about five attempts and tells me to enter my 'google' name and password

Some people love playing games!

On another note, found this nice article on the hciidc mailing list that demystifies the jargons web2.0 and RIA. Thanks Praveen for this one!

https://usmail.mphasis.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.lifecurry.com/Professional_RIAWeb.html

Eblogger sucks!

2006-12-10T15:59:00.000-08:00

Maybe they'll throw me out after this one. Perhaps that will be the early demise of my blogging career - but oh well!
So i was inspired to start a blog, partly by Donna M and partly by a close school friend who asked me to review her blog, and i promptly found myself at Blogger.com opening an account.
I was all excited and couldn't wait to put in my first post. When I did log in again - I could not remember the fancy username that I had created, much less the password.
So i did the most obvious, clicked on Forgot Password and waited. Nothing happened - no email. nothing.
I decided to try again and came to blogger.com - and what do i see - Sign in to blogger / Sign in to blogger beta - what the heck, where did i register? Oh wow, they actually provided a friendly message - if you have created an account after 10th november 2006, sign in to blogger beta. But I did'nt see that message the first time at all, did I?
And now here's the fun part - i tried to sign in and it didnt work and I came back to the homepage a third time, and what do I see! Sign in using your Google username!
That I knew, and this is how I came here. But I guess the entire cycle's going to repeat again the next time i try to log in. Some one's idea of fun, huh?
Oh and btw, isnt a 'draft' supposed to open in an editable format by default?

About Me

2006-12-10T15:53:00.000-08:00

Hi and welcome to my blog. This blog is dedicated to my passion and profession - usability. I intend to use this space to share my work, work related thoughts and happenings as I dabble in this slightly niche sphere of work.
More later,
have a nice weekend.