Experience in User Research, Interaction Design (UI), Usability Testing, Gestural Interface, Mobile Design, iPhone & iPad Apps Designs, E-commerce Websites & Enterprise Web Applications
User Experience
Rise of Smart phones & Fall of Feature phones. The trend of designing mobile UI for specific user group is slowly diminishing.
Jun 30th
With the news of withdrawal of Microsoft kin mobiles(Project Pink), for whatever rumored reasons, I am wondering if there was really a need for different UI for different user segments. As Kin phones were targeted for Teens with low cost and cloud storage and sync, the same can be achieved with just a change of skins to OS based phones. The OS based phones already offer social applications, cloud syncing, multimedia and games. Here i am talking about phones like iPhone & Android. Windows 7 is still not out in the market.
Traditionally all the hardware companies made many mobile phones , each targeted for ’so-called’ different user groups – college going, business users, multimedia users, gaming users, etc. And accordingly the price and features are added or removed from each phone to create thousands of models. Non of these phones are perfect for anyone. Forget the UI design. Do you really need so many variety of phones from same company ? or only one phone for all, like iPhone from Apple. Yes, Apple only has one phone.
I use iPhone for emails, photos, cloud syncing, etc. all the day. When i go home, my 3yr daughter uses my iPhone very easily to navigate to games and play games. More >
Designers as Entrepreneurs
Jun 29th
Whenever I look at a great software product or a product company, I see that they were started by someone with strong engineering background. I can hardly recall if there are any product companies stated by designers. By saying designers, I mean UX designers (Lets keep Industrial designer out for time being). Ya, designers do have stared some UX service companies. What after that ?
Whenever you have a great idea, designers are constrained by their lack of software programming knowledge. They have to depend on software engineers. They cannot own the product code or check-in their idea to apps stores. Whereas software programmers can easily hire designers and still fully control the code ownership. Is it that in a software product, UX is not a core requirement ? UX can be done by anyone with good commonsense and little readings.
Or is it that the entrepreneurial nature of UX designer is less then a engineer ? Do designers like the cozy jobs and live in their fancy world of creativity & criticism ? Are they afraid to take business challenges which programmers can take? Are designers soft hearted and shy ? I know UX designers cannot be that shy, they do have to sell their ideas like a sales persons. More >
Mobile Future
Mar 8th
some abstracts from web on Mobile Future
1. Mobile advertising will surpass the decidedly outmoded Web1.0 & computer-centric advertising- and ads will become content, almost entirely. Advertisers will, within 2-5 years, massively convert to mobile,
location-aware, targeted, opt-ed-in, social and user-distributed ‘ads’; from 1% of their their budgets to at least 1/3
of their total advertising budget. Advertising becomes ‘ContVertising’ – and Google’s revenues will be 10x of what
they are today, in 5 years, driven by mobile, and by video.
2. Tablet devices will become the way many of us will ‘read’ magazines, books, newspapers and even ’attend’ live concerts, conferences and events.The much-speculated Apple iPad will kick this off but every major device maker will copy their new tablet within 18 months. In addition, tablets will kick off the era of mobile augmented reality. This will be a huge boon to the content industries, worldwide – but only if they can drop their mad content protection schemes, and slash the prices in return for a much larger user base.
3. Many makers of simple smart phones – probably starting with Nokia- will make their devices availablefor free – but will take a small cut (similar to the current credit-cards) from all transactions that are done More >
UX Process
Feb 4th
Usability Roles and Competencies
Oct 9th
Usability Roles, Job Title and competencies
Click the image to enlarge. Please send suggestions and corrections. If I have left any roles and titles do let me know.
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My Bycicle routes
