Happy to help? Dont think so

My friend finds some or the other reason to go boozing i guess...

Me: You again in the bar? Is everything alright?

Friend: No. This time I'm not happy with the vodafone advertisements.

Me: You mean the Happy to help campaign? you are pissed with vodafone for some reason?

Friend: You know I pay 2 rupees per minute as per my prepaid lifetime scheme.

Me: Yea, you chose to pay that anyway. So whats wrong?

Friend: Totally wrong for the old customer and totally good for the new customer.

Me: How come?

Friend: Apparently the new customers of lifetime prepaid will be charged Rupee 1 per minute.

Me: So you the old customer of same plan, pay more?

Friend: Yep, loyalty means nothing to these companies.

Me: I am beginning to worry about you man.

Sliding Budgets

This time the doubt was mine

Me: Can I ask you something to validate a point in my mind?

Friend: Sure

Me: If you want to buy something, say an air ticket to Delhi will you say I’m ready to pay any amount between 5k and 10k for it or just say any amount below 10k? I.e. you are happy if it comes for 7k

Friend: neither, if I want to go to Delhi at any cost, I would just sort options with total price in ascending order and pick the best rate with best experience that I may get with the least trouble

Me: Fair enough. But here it’s not at any cost. You have a budget. My question is will you fix your budget as a range between amounts or only the max amount you are willing to pay

Friend: Not range will use max. I know why you are asking me this. It’s the slider right?

Me: Yes

Friend: That is nothing but bull shit, it has no use at all. I will never say I’m willing to pay an amount between 5k and 10k for my ticket. Why should I be ever worried about my min price?

Me: Well I can always ignore the left slider and always use the right slider but again there is a problem. I will never have my budget set for amounts like 11200, 9900 and 7600. Sliders make sense when you have to gradually increase or decrease something (volume control, brightness) or to block a specific time period (10.20am to 12.15pm) etc.

Friend: I’m happy to see the top of the range options. I am smart enough to choose the best within my budget. That slider proves nothing at all especially in a travel site

Me: I personally have never used it. I always sorted

Friend: The first time it was done was (I think) by kayak.com the travel search engine way back in 2005. They were new and were trying to break into the market and were adding all sorts of gizmos to the search form and came up with the stupid slider and now it proliferated into as many sites as I can see. I don’t think I have seen that in Amazon.

Sliders may be useful when you don’t know what you are looking for. E.g. you are going to buy an external hard drive and you wonder for your budget what amount of memory you will get. You put the range filter in the memory size and sort the price then you get a real good user experience because you know you have a need to have 10GB minimum and for future purposes you want to have room for up to 50GB. So you would look for a list of vendors/devices that sells something on 10GB and you wish to settle anything in between 30 or 40 GB range for the best price so you may have a good shopping experience. But to put a range filter on price is useless. Nobody would set a minimum budget

Me: Yes. It’s just the need of having a range to filter results and if yes whether a slider interaction makes sense. But I think we can’t say that a min budget is useless in all cases

Friend: which case do you think it will be useful?

Me: I have had budget ranges when I looked for buying gifts. I.e. a minimum amount I’m willing to shell out and a max amount cap

Friend: hmm fair enough

As I always say no feature is completely useless. It all depends on the use case

Power users are supposed to be intelligent

My friend had a doubt in Gmail

Friend: In Gmail how do you see only the emails that are starred and also tagged with something specific?

Me: Go to show search options put label:yourlabel in has the words box and select starred in search in drop box. Not very intuitive but you can do it. Its a power user feature

Friend: oh ok

Me: Basically you see all the mails labeled with YourLabelName if you search for Label:YourLabelName

Friend: ok

Me: So in advanced search we just say search in starred

Friend: I looked at this screen but then i did not use it

Me: k

Friend: I did not know the has words as labels

Me: It need not be labels

Friend: Actually does not work quite right when i search label:Umesh

Me: If u say label:umesh then it searches for mails with label Umesh. If you want to search mail from me the operator is from:umesh

Me: You can also do your query using only search operators in the simple search box. in: is for searching in a particular group/box. By group I mean inbox, starred, chats, spam etc. So your query could be in:starred from:umesh label:usability to see all mails from Umesh, labeled usability and were starred

Friend: ah cool it works

Me: There are lots of such advanced features in Gmail which are not out right straight forward. The UI is for simple usage and advanced things like this people like us will figure out; thats the idea. They give tips and tricks on their blog

Friend: But then how did you figure it out in the first place?

Me: If you are "powerful" enough to do such kind of mail searches using the UI you can notice the subtle hints Gmail provides using which you can explore further.

eg As a normal user when you click on a label to view all mails in that label just notice the search box. Gmail gives you the hint that its actually doing a search with the operator label:LabelName. Similarly when you click on trash the search box says in:trash, and when you click on a name in your contacts to see all the conversations you had with that person the search box shows from:ContactName. Actually I first noticed the label hint and then explored more out of curiosity to discover others.

Friend: Fair enough

You can have advanced features in your application which will make your power users happy and expose them like something as simple as a tips and tricks list. But the UI should be always targetted for simple usage.

May 16: Updated with the discoverability point. Thanks to Vinodh for bringing up the point

How good is a camera phone?

I posses a point and shoot Sony Cybershot DSC-P72 camera using which I have been taking photographs for the past 5 years. Not that I’m absolutely happy with the outcome of the camera but as I don’t have a budget set apart for buying a better camera I’m forced to be content with what I shoot as of now. The camera has a very basic set of features which I can play with and the lens is only good enough for a point and shoot. To keep myself happy I concentrate more on interesting compositions, lighting and of course the subject and I think I have been quite successful with that.

As a person who is not even that happy with a cybershot I have never understood the need of a camera on my mobile phone which comes with even lesser features. When I recently bought a phone a camera hadn’t even featured in the priority features I was looking for. But the other day I happened to look out of the window of my office building and saw an interesting sight on the parking lot below. A tiny Reva sandwiched in between two giants; A Tata Safari and a Toyota Innova. The symmetry in which they were parked and also the giants in black color made it look so interesting and unaffordable to miss out uncaptured. For a minute I felt so bad that I didn’t have my camera with me but I quickly remembered my newly acquired E51, pulled it out and shot the sight. Of course the quality of the picture was low but I was happy that I didn’t let the interesting sight go uncaptured. And now I know what’s the true use case of a mobile phone camera.

Annoying Stickies

My friend says

I think it is easy to think of an idea for a product, but harder to materialise it. The hardest bit is to have great idea and come up with a product design that is usable. But usability does not stop just there. Even the tiniest of the problem could annoy your user. Take for e.g. I get really annoyed at the stickies that come with my new purchases.

I bought a fridge recently. An expensive, top quality, super cool (really), which comes with a mini manual stuck on its door. After a month or so, you get used to it and it is the time to unwrap the protective cellophane and get rid of the ugly stickers. Who would want to drive with an L board after they get the license. Anyway, some of them come off clean, but others wont. That becomes a problem to clean. I tried cleaning with all sorts of cleaning agents, but no luck. I realised I should have let the sticker be there, but its too late now.

Not just the manufacturers, even the sellers add to the problem. I bought a water bottle, nothing fancy, but the super market have to have its mark on it, guess what Buy 1 Get 1 Free sticker. I tried to remove it, it does not come off clean. Now it looks horrible. I just wish all stickers are made to be easily peeled off.

I also experience stickies on my satellite fed TV shows. TATA Sky, to protect from piracy adds an 8 digit number on the screen at random positions at random times. Really annoying.