Forgot Password?

Whitespace reader and eminent Tamil writer Sathyaraj Kumar has a tongue in cheek take on my previous post Gmail search doesn't suggest.



In his Tamil blog post Make life easier he says after being inspired by my post he came up with a screen like this which suggested passwords in case we didn't get it right.

Oh btw my friend Arun forgets his passwords all the time. He has posted a comment on my post Twitter is Changing!!!. He says how he felt good when he read the Twitter mail which he got when he requested to reset his password. It apparently said

Hey there.
Can't remember your password, huh?
It happens to the best of us.
...

Gmail search doesnt suggest

I really like the way Google suggests words when I misspell my search keywords. Now yahoo suggests words in real time as and when I type which is really useful and time saving as I don't have to wait for the search results to show up to know that I have misspelled the word. It also allows me to fine tune my search according to the real time suggestions Yahoo gives me. I also use Google search to get my spellings right when I'm in doubt; I type the wrong spelling into the search box and Google corrects me with the right spelling. This is a very peculiar use case.

But why did Google restrict the spelling suggestions only to its main search? When I search for something in Gmail I don't get these suggestions. Gmail could not only show me the results for my misspelled word but also let me know that I have actually made a typo and suggest that I run the search for the right word.

I know that it's my problem that I don't get my spellings right but computers are here to make my life easier right? :-)

Playfulness in interaction design

More on the new age human web messages... (This can be an on going series I think)

Avenue A RazorFish's Digital Design blog explains how the incorporation of playfulness in user interfaces enhance user engagement and ultimately brand perception.

Some excerpts

And there’s no reason why as Kevin correctly pointed out that financial institutions can’t benefit from introducing playfulness into their interfaces. A financial application does not need to be dull and boring. What matters is how well we do something and there is fine line between being playful and being annoying or redundant.

The sorts of playfulness we see in our interfaces and brands says a lot about the designers, engineers and managers behind a product and the extent to which they will go to connect with their users.

The real challenge comes in convincing certain clients that incorporating playfulness into their interfaces/brand is worthy of the time, effort and risk involved.

Check it out. Its an interesting read.

This is what I have been reading

My Google Reader Trends say that from my 89 subscriptions, over the last 30 days I've read 1,260 items, starred 8 items, shared 82 items, and emailed 7 items.

Shared? What did I share?

That's the Other News section on the right side bar of this page. Those are the items I have shared with the world which I think would sum up to be an interesting read. It has interesting UX design concepts and info, tech industry breaking news, reviews, major software feature updates and some nice cartoon strips. Just the items i have read and found good enough to be shared. It's kinda a one stop for anyone interested in the tech industry to be up to date.

The trends also say that my top 5 shared items come from

1. Techcrunch
2. Scobleizer
3. Signal vs. Noise
4. Blognation India
5. Cleartrip Blog

Scoble calls his shared items as Link Blog. So do I. So this is my Link Blog which I broadcast regularly. Oh it has a feed too which you can add it to your feed reader (I recommend Google Reader).

I'm overloaded!!!

Needless to say I'm overloaded with information. I read a lot now a days, thanks to Google Reader and I have 155 items still to be read. Phew.

ICICI account holders can use any ATM

Long queues in front of all the ICICI ATMs have become a regular sight now a days. Its really a waste of time to wait in those serpentine lines to take out 500 bucks and if at all we are in a hurry it's not the right place you can go to withdraw money. In stark contrast to ICICI ATMs all other banks' ATMs are relatively deserted and are found highly under utilised.

Do you know that an ICICI account holder can use any banks' ATM to withdraw money? ICICI will revert the service charges charged by those banks back to your account, provided you maintain a quarterly balance of Rs 5000/- Rs 10,000/-.

From now onwards, if you are confident of maintaining the minimum balance, instead of choking the ICIC ATMs try withdrawing money from ATMs of banks which are the likes of Corporation Bank, Karnataka Bank, Bank of Baroda, South Indian Bank, Federal Bank etc. Distribute the usage and save loads of time.

I think ICICI should advertise this service of theirs more effectively by putting up posters in front of all their ATMs.

Microsoft Expression around the clock

Just got back from the Microsoft Expression around the clock event at Fuga, a pub off Brigade Road. Got to see some cool demos of Microsoft Expression Studio suite of products and met up with some interesting people in the user experience domain.

The event, which was very design focused, kick started with an interesting talk by Shelly Armstrong - Design Manager, Xbox & Zune, on how to stay creative. Her presentation showed her team’s designs done for Zune and Xbox, talked about the work culture of her team, how they constantly get inspired by stuff and how work and play work wonders for their creativity. She also gave out suggestions for us designers on how to innovate with ideas and also to diversify our interests in order to stay creative.

One of the points in her presentation said

Dont ask for permissions. Beg for Pardon.

Then was the Designing with Expression Blend demo by Supreet and Pandurang. Supreet is a designer and Pandurang is a coder and together they showed how Expression Blend can be used to make coders and designers work in harmony in an integrated environment. I liked the way they showed the designer doing something on Blend and passing it over to the coder to write the logic for it on Visual Studio. I would very well relate to it coz I used to do things like that a couple of years ago when I was working on the .Net platform. The best thing of .Net I found was the ability to work on two different layers of presentation and logic. In our company we had made a rule that only designers should touch the aspx page and the cs file where the logic behind the aspx componenets were written was all for the coders. It was so convenient that way that the designer can do his work of presenting things in a compelling way using the aspx page and there was no way the coder was going to screw up the html or any other design element. The only difference was that then I used to work on aspx pages using Dreamweaver and the coders used visual studio. And now there is Blend to replace Dreamweaver and is more integrated with the development environment.

The usual suspects were missing except for Param of GE Healthcare Onward Research + Consulting and my friend Mahesh Shantaram, the independent photographer. Mahesh noticed my shirt once again and asked

Oh so you are in your usual pink floral shirt eh?

I corrected him

This time its pink leaves. Not flowers.

We had a nice talk about the current trend of social networking sites; why he likes Facebook more than Orkut etc. It seems he was interested in the Expression suite to know how he can make use of it to create different photography presentation experiences.

Also met Shilpa of OnMobile, Vinodh and Upma of Aditi, Harish Kumar of OneBigWeb, Visakh and Sumeet of Silicon India. We talked about the kind of work we do and had some interesting discussions too. Met Ramji Ganti of whom I had only heard about through the bangalore designers google group. The way he showed his excitement of meeting me made me feel like a celebrity :-)

The bar was open throughout the event and the drinks flowed. And there was a goodie bag too for all the attendees which had a Expression Studio 60 days trial CD, a copy of the Design Now magazine and a cool Reebok t-shirt.