Small Wonder

Great experiences never look “designed”. But that doesn’t mean the experience was not designed. It’s just that great designs are invisible. The outcome of great designs are often looked as the most obvious thing to be or the simplest thing ever. The well designed experience can be so smooth that no one ever realizes that someone actually thought and made that experience to be like that and its not really the only way it could have been.

Why I love twitter is coz of this reason that it’s so well designed that it looks like the simplest thing ever. Whatever you can actually “see” in Twitter as a tool is so tiny even though the impact it creates is huge. Twitter as a tool is a breeze to use, there is nothing much to figure out to use it and nothing much to do to setup things.

For example, in Twitter you can choose to receive tweets on your phone as text messages. You need to register your phone with twitter to get it activated. Once you put in your phone number Twitter shows a PIN and asks you to send it from the phone number to validate if the number your have entered is right. Now the interesting part is here. I have seen so many sites giving me PIN for phone validation but the PIN Twitter gave me was special. It was wgjmga



Now what’s special about wgjmga? Look at it carefully… Ok if you still didn’t get it start typing them on the phone and you will. The 6 letter PIN needs only the same number of key punches as it’s a combination of all the first letters on the phone keys.

Now this is what I call a good design as seldom users will even have the time to actually notice it, he would finish the task in a jiffy and continue with other good things in life. This is what I also call a small wonder coz it’s a small experience which makes life really easy. Oh well it also proves that design is not only about photoshop :-)

Share and share alike

Yes we know that Google Reader introduced a feature to share the articles with our contacts. This was further extended to share with notes. This is new and very few of my friends use it. Not often, but I do find the Share feature abused. I do have to say that sometimes I get overloaded with friends shares, apart from the inundation from blog writers. So I felt compelled to add some tips about the netiquette of sharing

• Read all posts from your friends, if suddenly they become a sharial killer, tell them to stop.
• Do not share gossip or trivial articles, use twitter if you have to, luckily it crashes when you do so :-)
• Never share your writing from your own blog, most likely your friends are aware of your blog and will be on top of it (Yeah I've stopped doing it).
• Ah yes, notes, be concise and remember you are saying it in some random space on the internet, which may or may not be heard.
• If you want to note something of importance for your future reference, use a bookmarking service like delicious or even note but do not share (Not very straight forward though, more on that later).

I consider shares to be something important that you feel the urge to discuss with me, so better it be important or else I am going to ignore you like you did with this post.

What did I do?

My friend sounded worried on phone

Friend: I was reading through my Google reader items and suddenly it showed a message "Oops, unable to complete task, try again later ". What does that mean?

Me: On yeah when you read through the items, Reader does some server calls in the background, perhaps to mark that post was read by you. It had connection problem so it was not able to complete the task and thats why the message.

Friend: But the point is, I am not the one who started that task. Reader did it automatically and when failed its asking ME to try again. Funny.

Me: Hmm Hmm

So is there a better way to convey the error happened on a non user initiated Ajax call? Or is it needed at all?