Ninad's (lazy) Blog

The story so far....

Why Email Clients Need to Change

via gigaom.com

My inbox is broken.

Not in an I-can’t-check-my-messages kind of way, but in a fundamental, inboxes-will-never-be-the-same-again kind of way.

Analysis of inbox traffic for 30 daysWith every birthday reminder, bill confirmation, new friend, direct message, password recovery, and mailing list, the content of our inboxes becomes less and less a means of communication and more and more a record of all we do online. Email is the lowest common denominator of digital identity. It’s our web keychain. It’s the catch-all of our online lives.

But if inboxes don’t fundamentally change in order to adapt to their new role as the keeper of myriad transactions across the entire web, they’ll be obsolete.

This is something that I have been thinking for a long time. There is so much intelligence that can be built into the email client. The Email client is completly aware of an indivisuals digital identity, travel, bank statements, newsletters etc. I think is there is so much potential for innovation.

Getting Priority on Support Requests from Users

Dhsup

I came across this screen in the support section of my hosting company when I was trying to create a support request for a a small issue - I wanted my personal URL (mail.domainname.com) to work for my email as opposed to a partially branded url given by google (google.com/a/domainname/mail or something like that). nothing critical, nothing that i cant live without.. 

I like this approach of getting context on the priority of my request as opposed to just asking me directly, like: low, high, important, critical etc. i''m sure i would have picked important, if not critical or this simple issue. 

Options like the ones shown in the image made me think about how important this request is, and I actually picked the most appropriate options as compared to important. 

Jakob Nielsen on Agile Development Projects and Usability

We're on our way to adopting agile practices here at Directi. I being on the UX side of things, know how a lot of usability related things get pushed out of the process because we want to be agile. For some reason, it almost seems like people think agile means FAST?.
Having said that, I think we're doing far more than most software companies do. I'll try and share some inshights on prototyping tools, process and methodos we use soon.

Today, Jakob Nielsen addresses a few Issues on this Topic, here is the summary:

Summary:
Agile methods aim to overcome usability barriers in traditional development, but pose new threats to user experience quality. By modifying Agile approaches, however, many companies have realized the benefits without the pain.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/agile-methods.html

Ascending/Descending - Don't Make me Think

Recently, while I was using the MS Excel to look at some reports, I noticed a small yet interesting change makd to the 'Sort & Filter' tool. Many times while observing users I noticed that the best of them get confused when choosing between Ascending/Descending to sort data. Its not a big deal and people don't even realize this. But when I analyzed the problem, I realized that this 'decision making' actually comes in between the user and his task to sort the data, its a context switch.

In the new Excel, they have removed all ambiguity and simply called the Buttons 'Sort A to Z' and and vice versa OR Sort 'Smallest to Largest' and vice versa for letters and numbers respectively.

Just keep it simple, Dont Make me Think.

Stanford is studying Facebook.

Why Study Facebook?

Our current focus on Facebook extends research we did in 2006 on how Web 2.0 sites motivate and persuade people. Our investigations last year showed that every successful Web 2.0 company followed the same
persuasion pattern; we outlined this pattern and called it the “Behavior Chain of Online Participation” (a journal article should be out in October). By looking at what works in the real world, we contributed new insights to captology, the study of computers as persuasive technology.

We don’t yet know what new insights we’ll gain by focusing on Facebook. But that’s what makes research fun: You don’t know for sure what you’ll discover.

Yet one thing seems clear: What we learn in this project will go beyond Facebook. To be sure, the psychology that drives Facebook relates directly to other online success stories, including those Internet blockbusters yet to be invented.

– BJ Fogg, Ph.D., & the Persuasive Technology Lab

http://credibilityserver.stanford.edu/captology/facebook/

Amazon's Initiative alleviate 'Wrap-Rage' (finally someone thought of this!)

Each time I've opened a product packing which is not usable, i've wondered if the people behind these packaging ever think that these products have to come out of the plastic some day...

The second picture above is a box of cheese which was really easy to open. Notice the red thread which runs around the box. just pull the string!