Colgate moment…
September 25th, 2008
Colgate moment…, originally uploaded by rajsid.
Ollie’s almost 3 and enjoys brushing till she sucks up all the toothpaste.
Facilitative Leadership®
November 12th, 2007Last week, I was out in San Francisco attending the ‘Facilitative Leadership® workshop’ at the interactive associates office. The workshop is designed to help team leaders and managers to bring out the best in their team mates. The workshop comprised of class room learning, team building activities, watching videos, role playing and sharing each others experience by just talking to each other. There were 18 participants and two instructors per class allowing a high level of attention from the instructors.
Interaction Associates’ Facilitative Leadership® workshop as described on the Interactive Associates website explores the relationship between leadership and participation and offers a proven method for turning obstacles into opportunities. Seven Leadership Practices provide a framework for improving the effectiveness of team, project, and organizational leaders. Workshop participants will learn how great leaders inspire commitment and make people feel they are part of a larger, more meaningful effort.
BOO!!
October 31st, 2007
Oh… It’s so easy to use!!!
October 23rd, 2007Product companies are becoming more and more aware of the need for good user experience design. Product designers are expected to design products that are ‘easy to use’.This raises an alarming question. Is the term ‘ease of use’ well understood in the industry? Does making everything easy to use guarantee good user experience? Should ‘ease of use’ be the mantra behind good product design?
Imagine a physical world where everything is extremely easy to use. There will be no speed bumps so that it will be easy to drive. There will be no stop signs at intersections so that the driver would not have to stop.
As a designer, I have spent hours explaining the real intend behind the term ‘ease of use’. As Wikipedia states, ease of use refers to the property of a product or thing that a user can operate without having to overcome a steep learning curve. This does not mean that all the features of a product should to be extremely easy to use. It should be easy to figure out what each features mean and how to use them even if some of the features are designed to be difficult to use. Let’s consider this examples from the physical world. I recently replaced the main door knobs of my house with child proof ones that makes it hard for my 2 year old daughter to open. My daughter is certainly a user of the door and finds it extremely difficult to open the doors, but the act of changing the door knobs solves the very problem that I was trying to solve.
Ease of use is about ‘communication of use’ or ‘predictability of use’. It is completely acceptable to make certain features hard to get to if it triggers critical consequences. A successful design solution should always be sensitive to the context that it will be applied to. There is no design solution that can be used for the same user interactions in every context. Most applications have a delete function. It’s hard to propose an ‘easy to use’ delete interaction that can be consistently applied everywhere. The interaction model should be sensitive to the type of data that the user will be deleting and to the context that they will using this delete function.
The need to address the context is always a challenge to defining meaningful component libraries. It’s important not to confuse consistency with monotony. While defining reusable components, it is important to design several variations of the same component to be used in different contexts. Using ‘delete’ as an example again, the delete model for deleting an email should be different from the delete model for deleting a server configuration (that probably took hours to set up).
That was ‘easy’. Wasn’t it?
Mac OS X Leopard
October 16th, 2007Apple will be hitting the stores with it’s latest version of its OS X (v10.5) - The Leopard on 26th October 2007.Leopard comes packed with over 300 new cool features that will enhance the apple experience. Apple has amazed me through Tiger, Panther and Now leopard. Of all of the Leopard features, Time Machine is the one that excites me the most. Under the hood, it’s a powerful back up system built into the OS. The user does not have to deal with boring/complex version control concepts. The interface shows several versions stacked one behind the other in the order of time. This visual representation is a lot advanced than a table with time stamp columns. Quick Look lets you see the contents of a file without even opening it. I have always been a strong advocate of the browse to view concept.
The old desktop with scattered files is history. The new version of the launcher includes the desktop and ability to stack and shuffle files.
