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  • Posted on January 18, 2012

Online collaboration with Stixyboards

Collaboration is the next jig ! may it be corporate business or project discussion; all in all: Facebook-like real time collaboration is the buzzword.

I am heavily into merging Social communication into Business collaboration now a days. Hence bumping-on-to interesting ones in that league :)

Stixy is an online bulletin board. You can create as many Stixyboards as you like, one for each project. Use Stixy to easily organize and share: your family’s schedule, projects at work, an upcoming holiday, your photos, or share a file or two with a friend.

It’s worth advanced playing with stixy.com

  • Posted on December 01, 2011

Five Manifestos for the Creative Life


Some days everyone needs a little extra encouragement.

The words or lines or colors don’t want to come, or worse, we don’t even want to sit down to create. That’s when we turn to these inspiring manifestos, any one of which is guaranteed to give our uncooperative creativity a sharp kick in the pants.

Here are five of our favorite contemporary manifestos that nudge ideas out of your head and into the hands of the world.

» As it’s in brainpickings.org

  • Posted on November 20, 2011

What if some one reading your Gmail secretly ?

Other day, my home internet connection went for a toss . And had to send an emergency mail. So obvious choice was next door cyber cafe. Been there and done that.

Voila ! what a rude shock ! Next day, when I accessed Gmail at office, I got a notification that, my Gmail ID was used to create a Facebook & some other accounts. What the heck ? I never created new Facebook profile in last two days. Then who did what with my login credentials ?

Crux was, some one got hold of my Gmail password after my cyber cafe browsing episode and tried to impersonate me. Isn’t it dangerous when you’ve bank-statements, important documents, spreadsheets & Picasa photos are under one Gmail hood ?

I started sensing the dangers of ‘virtual world’ ! I’ve read a lot about people  got hacked with their accounts and I never thought one day, I would be the victim of it !

I went paranoid after that incident, which is obvious when you’ve have highly sensitive information is stored in Gmail.I access Gmail in variety of devices. I don’t remember, how many times I’ve changed my password.

That being said, mine is a solid use-case for Google to come with a novel ‘extra level of security’ that I’ve seen often in Banking sites and corporate authentication. That’s why Google is the most trusted partner by many who have their vulnerable & highly sensitive information stored in Gmail servers.

Gmail is flashing notifications about how to Enable 2-step verification to protect your account. Learn how to make your account a hack proof !

  • Posted on October 15, 2011

The Angry Birds Addiction

If you’ve not played ‘Angry Birds’, you’ve not lived in this tech era ! :)

I’ve played enough of it since the day of its release on Android. Played it in every possible place where ever I can carry my phone. It’s damn addictive and it’s not a new thing anymore.

There are days when you really feel like throwing something at somebody and angry birds is a safe enough antidote without actually breaking anything–things and feelings … this is what really makes it very appealing.

Someone calls it Angry Birds Addiction Syndrome. Not sure it’s a medical pathology yet, but for sure it’s the game that changed the history of mobile gaming.

This single-most-addictive game on my cell phone always made me ponder over ‘why it’s so additive and attractive’ ? is it because of simple graphic, is it for minimalistic controllers, is it because of highly usable & consumable gestures ? is it for dumbest of the dumb metaphor :), is it because of that unique combination of visuals and sound ? I don’t know !

A study by AYTM investigated the psychological and sociological motives behind the incredible success of Rovio’s invention. A great infographic helps “profiling” Angry Birds fans, and it proves useful to understand the mechanisms that trigger the success of the game as well as how consumers’ mood changes when playing the game.

>> Checkout  Angry birds addiction in infographics

  • Posted on October 05, 2011

Enticing photos at 1X

Flickr is crowded and I need a sweet, sharp and savorable place to admire photos. So is 1x.com. The stylish and elegant photo sharing site. I secretly admire lovely bunch of photos at my all-time favorite 1x.com. Every photo amazes, entices me there.

I found it most enjoyable photography site on web. It’s uniqueness, clarity and hand-picked photos make it a must visit site.

1x is an online photo gallery and social network. What makes 1x different from most other photo sites is that every photo displayed has been hand picked by a professional curator.

Only 1/20 photos uploaded are published, which has resulted in a gallery of world class photography. Many of the exceptional photos published on 1x can be bought as premium fine art prints, delivered right to your doorstep. | via 1x

  • Posted on October 03, 2011

Firefox – UI technique

Data can be searched, formatted, over-viewed, and browsed in a variety of ways. Firefox is using neat in-line content call-out user-interface technique in add-on page. This is quite an interesting pattern which is already used in interesting ways in many places using Ajax to load content quickly.

This User Interface component is a great space saver and quick to learn the context of use. Mozilla has used this nicety UI-element in many areas to de-congest overtly crowded extension pages. It’s highly usable and at the same time user can navigate around pages giving prominence to most needed content.

  • Posted on February 08, 2011

Context of use in Facebook

I faced an unique problem with Facebook off-late.

My friend Suzee got engaged to her dream man recently. She works as a  media person & has almost 500 people in her Facebook friends list;  who are quite active in interacting with her. But I don’t know many of them.When she posted her engagement snap, I too expressed my happiness and commented on it. As she has enormous number of friends, they didn’t leave any chance in commenting on her engagement photo. (Persona, of a typical user)

So what’s the problem in it ?

I have enabled an option to receive Facebook comments notifications to my email. Meaning, every comment or like the Suzee’s engagement photo gets, I get an email notification from Facebook. 

Now what ? why Facebook team is not aware of this ?

Infact, this lies in the problem of context analysis Facebook design team has done with the comment and notification design. They have used an unique way to get to know what happens amongst friends, get to hear the rumors, get to know what known people are talking in ethnography. But they failed to understand the above context I mentioned. They fail to assess the individual context where ‘user just would like to comment but do not want to receive notification’

Now, I only want to to wish her or comment on the photo but don’t want to receive bulky email notifications from a single post. So one solution would be to turn-off email notifications altogether. Which would disable notifications across Facebook ! So Facebook could have done a ‘Context of Use and analysis’. which means – analyze the set of users, their actions and interactions with the application and address the outcome of it’.

They have done it but they failed to provide a solution for the question ‘what if user want to comment but don’t want to receive notifications from the comments thread’. (Problem Assessment)

This is what I propose as a design (UID) solution to the potential Facebook-bulk-notification problem. A check-box to disable notifications for an individual Facebook post. (Solution proposal)

The Context of Use is the actual conditions under which a given artifact/software product is used, or will be used in a normal day to day working situation. It is important to carry out usability tests, prototyping sessions, meetings, user studies and other “user-dependent sessions” in the context of use to get as high ecological validity of users findings as possible. | via

  • Posted on January 14, 2011

An Android on your wrist !

Why I say, this is unique and usable design invention ?

Unlike bygone, nokia titbits phone era, this is the large screen one-for-all kind of Android tablets era. Taking out larger behemoth for every small sound & action is unavoidable and unreasonable.

I always wished, if something can easily substantiate frequent-phone-viewing action, that’s going to be a cool invention. I’m sure, Sony may have figured it out with smart field-studies research & here is the result !

You’ve been asking for someone, anyone, to please kick out a tiny remote control display that can save you from having to whip your smartphone out for every little thing and Sony Ericsson, it seems, has listened.

The 1.3-inch OLED screen above is a new Bluetooth accessory for Android 2.x phones that’s said to function very much like a desktop widget. There’s an app you can install on your phone that’ll get it to communicate with the 128 x 128 pixel grid, which can then be used to read messages, find your phone, control music playback, and receive those precious social networking updates from your friends. | By Vlad Savov at www.engadget.com

More on Sony Ericsson LiveView