IAs on the go

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

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

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

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!

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

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.