My Experiences with Twitter

When I first joined twitter, I thought it was a crazy thing to use! My status?! I'm going to the loo now, and and now I'm out?!

Ok let's see my first few tweets:

1) Malleswaram, Monday Morning, Marketing, Managers, MacBookPro @mKhoj

2) Alan Cooper: Advocate of interaction design Alice Cooper: American rock singer, songwriter and musician AL COOPER <- Bad Design

3) Dear Corporate Flyers, FLY AWAY FROM HERE >:(

4) The Spirit of Bangalore! It rained!

5) and life is easy...those who think its hard are pessimists

6) @mituj: Are you taking Twitter so seriously?! God, are you American?!

7) Women are more dangerous than men... 2 hour Movies have Villains. A million episodes of a TV soap have VAMPS

8) People in Bangalore...do you hear Ambulance sirens really often nowadays? Something really wrong? Or just something fishy?! How to find out?

9) @mituj: what's this new event on the 9th? Come on Gtalk na...this is painful

10) The better team wins?! False. Chelsea totally controlled Barca...what a shame!

So, (6) and (9) clearly tells you what I thought about twitter in the initial stages.
Then I stopped tweeting for sometime. I just started following some people, whose view I wanted to know. Such as Vir Sanghvi and Shashi Tharoor :P

My twitter home was full of relevant and awesome tweets the moment I started following Chris Spooner, Smashing Magazine, & Abduzeedo. Probably, all on the same day. I'm a big fan of these guys, and must say they're responsible for Twitter being one of the first tabs I open in my browser.

I must thank twitter for their Retweet feature. Which they probably started just around the time I started following these guys. I have been getting really awesome tweets ever since, and I have been following really awesome twitter users.

Well, there are social networks like Facebook and Orkut, that are used to connect with "friends". And there are professional networks like Linkedin that help you to connect with relevant professional contacts.

But twitter, for me, is more of an information repository than a social network. I just have to mark some awesome articles as favourites. And hoping that pals from my profession are following me, I just have to RT and they get the links that I found are cool.

Finally, there are a lot of things to learn from the User Experience that twitter provides.

As Jack Dorsey mentions in the above video, they have been redesigning twitter according to what the users have asked for. They have been adapting to the users' habits, and not the other way round, which is exemplary.

I also like the way Twitter displays the tweets, one after the other. Even if there's a reply to a tweet, it doesn't appear in the tree structure, as they show it in most Comments section. Personally I feel, in the case of twitter, linear is cool.

Another thing I find really awesome is their display of "3 New Tweets" without page refresh. Many other portals do this (GMail does), and I think this boosts the user experience a lot.
Also, the tab saying: (3) Twitter/Home.

One more thing worth a mention: The Fail Whale. How awesome is that?! Now isn't that a really cool way to show that something's wrong?

Let me end this by saying: I'm not on Facebook; I don't need Facebook. But, I'm glad that I'm on Twitter. Thank you Twitter.

Inspiration to blog: Thank you Tina Ross Eisenberg

Got this video on twitter. I am absolutely starting to love this social networking site. Shall post about my experiences with twitter soon. (Now that I have resolved to blog regularly about design)

Thank you Tina Ross Eisenberg :)

Paradox of Choice

How many products do we have today that don't leave us in an indecisive state?

Even an Apple iPod comes with so many types and colours :)

Well, we designers cater to a vast range of users- coming from different cultures, different genders, different sexes, lefties & righties, etc,. So it's a rare case that products (esp. from big brands) are released without giving the user, the power of personalization.

Well, how important is giving variations of the same products? How bad is it to be decisive?

Let me know your feedback and examples.

On Mobile Phones, what say?

Designing for Mobiles: Users & Context from Niek Dekker on Vimeo

Context, Sensing And Mobile Design

View more presentations from Gabriel White. (tags: explicit implicit)

UX WEEK - Dec'08

Don Norman | UX Week 2008 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

I love this video. Designers & non-designers, everyone who wishes to understand what design is, must watch this. 

Experience Design

EXPERIENCE DESIGN with Mr.Shashank Mehta
by Chandni Garg, Richa Sharma, and Samir D.Bellare

• Area Selected: STAFF ATTENDANCE AREA

fig.1-View of entrance of the office area

fig.2-Computer with RFID System

fig.3-Narrow Passage to enter the campus

The staff comes across with a monotonous routine everyday. So, there is ample scope of enrichment in their experience, especially in the morning (when they enter), and in the evening(when they leave).

• Objective:
  To enrich the experience of the staff, and give them a feeling of uniqueness, in their everyday monotonous routine. The opportunity area we have chosen is the staff-attendance machine interface, where they come to mark their attendance in the mornings and check out in the evenings.

It is a very important area as it marks two important periods of the day for any professional, that is the start and the end of their work life.

• Process :

EXPERIENCE

We tried to brainstorm on this particular word. We asked ourselves questions like

'What is Experience?!' ;
'What are the various aspects associated with Experience?' ;

'What reminds me of a good experience?', etc.

We took out all the words we could associate with 'Experience', and then categorized them under various headers.

fig.4- Brainstorming Exercise

After this study we came up with five categories and represented them using the above diagram. The headers under which the points are defined are:

• Entertainment – The visual, auditory and mainly emotional aspects of media closely associated with the society.
  


• Feeling – The conscious or unconscious emotions one’s mind generates as a response to every stimulus.
  


• Environment – How one relates to nature and caring about its various aspects, as the repercussions affects oneself.
  


• Connections – Man being a social animal, has some connections and relations with every other entity.
  


• Memories – Experience is closely related with memories as one lives in close accordance to one’s past, which is stored in one’s brain as memories.

fig.5-Final Representation

• Design Solution:

So, we came up with this system, wherein the staff, when they mark their attendance every morning, will be greeted by their name and also complimented. This will indeed be a very unique experience for everyone in the staff. It is a vey peculiar experience when anybody is greeted by their name. (for e.g. If you call up some service helpline, and they address you as "Hello Mr.Mehta, how can I help you?" , you get the feeing of a personal touch). And when there is an extra compliment added, such as "Good Morning Susanth; that's a nice shirt you're wearing today!", the experience will be all the more enhanced.

We have recorded the experiences of two subjects who used the system while marking their attendance in the morning. We can see how they were surprised by the new system.

One may say that this system will become boring once the novelty is lost.
But there will be a database with greetings and the compliments which will be updated, so that the staff doesn't have a feeling of deja vu.
Hence, the experience of the staff will be enhanced by our system as the monotony of the staff member will be broken.

Here, Mrs. S. Shashikala gives us her feedback about the system, after using it.

-Thank You-

Touch Screen? Or Touch-me-Not?!

Touchscreen systems are much-hyped nowadays. PDAs that worked with the stylus, the recent advent of MotoRokrE6 in India, and I'll be a fool to miss out the Apple iPhone. You know what's lined up for you next?! Perhaps you do. For the ones who dont...
Microsoft Surface & Multi-Touch OS (by NID students Adithya Ananth & Divesh Jaiswal) along with their NaturalUI.

Hmmmm....after you've visited the sites, I'm sure you must be going 'Wow!'

Indeed its an innovation in user-interfaces. But something makes me think that it has great potential to mess up things. Not accepting the inevitable change (especially when its gotta do with a more natural user interface) is stupid, but obviously I have concerns:

1. Can the human finger be as precise as the tip of the mouse cursor?
2. How big or small can the interface be?
   
3. What about the ergonomics?
   
4. What will be the learning curve? Can the computer-user accept the change?
5. The UI looks welcoming to the non-tech-savvy people? Is it really?

Dan Saffer | UX Week 2008 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

I'd be editing this particular blog when more such issues come to my mind. I'd like you to comment about what you think could be the issues. And those in favour of the touch-screen are obviously welcome to prove my points wrong.