Archive for the 'user experience' Category
Friday, July 8th, 2011
A prayer to the email gods
I need a feature in my email, which is to the effect of saying “never receive any mail from this person again”.
You know, I don’t hate you, good fellas!
but when I subscribed to your mail, (or when you tricked me to subscribe) I thought you were good guys. And I, stupidly thought that you would sent me some good stuff, as you promised, which would be of value to me. I was duped. You started sending me all junk. All unwanted mails. Meh, I am not even remotely interested in all the new bullshit that you have done with your site.
You know what? I don’t care.
So stop sending me. But I know you don’t listen. I don’t want to mark you as spam either. I stupidly asked for it.
Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.
I could go and unsubscribe from your mailing list. I click a link which says “unsubscribe” and you simply drop me off the list. Ha! If things were that simple, I would have asked the Santa Claus for a better world. or at least for a better hike in my salary!
You take me thru the complex processes of unsubscribing- you make it really difficult for me. And in most cases, trying to unsubscribe is just a proof for you to know that it’s a valid email address and he is much saner than we thought, so let’s send him a lot more of our junk mails.
But for the mail programs, it’s simple- just block everything from this particular mail id. They are not spam, just that I lost interest in their service.
Can you do that, my email demi gods?
photo by thrill kills sunday pills
Sunday, January 24th, 2010
usability problem – multi level car parking
A company is building a huge multilevel car parking. It is 10 floors high and 200 cars per floor. While this new parking space will solve a lot of problems for the people, there is a new issue that is creeping up.
How to remember where exactly you parked your car. Frankly i have faced this issue with a 4 floor building, with just 50 cars/floor.
“hmmm was it on the ninth floor ? or seventh ? I think its an odd number..”
Some guys who are very meticulous will remember the floor and the parking bay number. But most of us, dont; given the fact that you are already late for the breakfast meeting.
Its a user experience problem. how can we help the memory load of the user?
How can we, as user experience designers, the user?
Ofcourse, we can have different colors for each floors, number them in big fonts, which will help for. at best, 2 weeks.
After that the question will be ” Was it on the red floor ? or the yellow one ? i think it was a bright color…”
“Defenitely its not blue, it was yesterday that i parked in the blue floor.”
Ofcourse, we can give bay numbers like 9-193 or 8-132. But thats what the administrative folks do- not the user experience designers.
In both the solutions above, the end result will be that after your tedious day, you will be lugging your laptop which is growing heavy by minute, walking through at least a couple of floors, pressing the remote control door unlock button, till your car beeps to life, where you never expected it to be found.
yea, we can use technology. put an RFID tag in your car, link it with your mobile and which will pin point the lat and long of the car, use your GPS to walk up there. Maybe even get the car to start before you reach there.
Great ! now get out of that 2050 scene and tell me some simple solution which can be implemented cheaply.
photo by arinas74
Sunday, November 2nd, 2008
Skipping Advertisements on TV
All I would need is a small button. I am not aware of any TV remotes that has this button. But let me guarantee you, we are talking about a button which is going to be used very frequently. If you are a person like me, very very frequently.
Function of the button is simple- it swaps you to any other pre-set channel for a pre-set time, and returns back to the channel you were watching.
It works like this- Most programs have a specified time duration for the commercial break. for example, every 15 minutes you have a commercial break of 3 minutes.
The user has the option to set this time first. So when the ad starts the user presses a button, and again when the break ends. The stop watch calculates and sets the time.Then the user chooses to which channel he would like to swap to.
Consider you are watching a movie in STAR movies [1], and you calculate the typical ad break is for 3 minutes and set the swap time to 3 minutes. You choose your swap channel to be, say MTV.So next time when the ad break starts, user presses the SkipAd button, he is taken to MTV, watches/listens to music for 3 minutes and at the end of 3 minutes he is automatically swapped back to the Star Movies, just in the nick of time, so that he can continue to watch the movie.
I know for sure no TV manufacturer is going to add this feature, the channels are going to kick them if they do it. Someone will have to hack a remote and add this feature. I do not have any idea how to do it. Instructables has some good DIY articles, for remotes but not this feature.
Though it is an annoying user experience to have ad breaks in between the programs – I dont have a problem with the Ads, infact, I love the ads like this or this or this. And again I get irritated when the same stupid ad is played again and again, as if you are so dumb that you will not understand anything unless its fed into your senses multiple times, over and over again. Dude, I got it the first time you said that !
On the other hand, these are the so called pay channels. We pay for what we see.
How is it like to watch ads between a movie in a theatre ?
[1] from wikipedia on star movies india:
This beam is targeted towards India and the rest of South Asia. As of late the beam is only present in Nepal and Bhutan outside India. This beam has many advertisement breaks during films, creating an annoying viewer experience. As most Indian channels share this disadvantage, Indian viewers are forced to bear with it. The channel has higher TAM ratings in India over HBO South Asia. This is the only region where Star Movies enjoys a lead in the viewer ratings.
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007
Advertisements in news websites
Have you ever wondered how the sites would be without the ads?
Yea, i know some sites run on the money generated from ads. No problem. That is when the site is their main business. But what about the sites which are complimentary to their main business? That is they make the money through some other means, and use the sites to promote their main business? In that case their site itself becomes an ad for their main business!
I am taking about sites of news channels be it TV or newspaper. Their channel/newspaper is their main business- they sell ad slots and earn money to run their business. They also have websites to promote their channels and also as part of their “inclusive journalism”
What’s the prime purpose of the news channels? as they say “to treat news as sacred” “to give the viewer a voice and never talk down”
How about having
a little sensibility in the ad policy of the site?
I agree there are a few of the websites, which are better than the rest. I am talking about the others.
I dont mind watching an ad when I am reading Hollywood gossip stories- but not when I am trying to find the details of the terrorist bomb explosion in Mumbai. I don’t want to be interrupted by ads which make me click on the close button.
But sadly, if you see the present channel websites- most of them are a mess. Even in their home pages they have a lot of insensible ads. The users have to struggle through the ads to find what they are looking for. Forget the user centered design- they don’t even have an idea what it is. How many times have you found yourself staring at some nonsense ad, when you wanted to read some important news?
If you are a news channel, and is considering allocating adspace in your site, just keep in mind these simple rules. These are just the must haves.
1. do not allocate more than 10% of screen real estate for ads in the homepage. in the subsequent pages maybe the ads can be up to 15-20%.
2. Clearly demarcate the ads and you in house promos from the news.
3. No animation in ads, please.
4. Never never cover the data with ads.
If these websites were your news papers, they would be full of large holes with barely enough content material to hold these gaps together.
See for yourself – Here is a study of a few news channel websites and the ad content in them.
Comparison of websites and their ad content
Lets start with BBC, needless to say, the best of the lot. No ads at all
BBC
Times of India’s web site is much better than their newpaper, very less ads.
Times of India
See the hindu site.
The hindu
NDTV
Indian Express
Aajtak, with a lot of “blackspace”
Aajtak
And finally the worst of the lot
CNN IBN
A long way to go, guys !
UPDATE :
CNN IBN changed their website. See here. Little better now, is this what they call CNN IBN Impact ? 
