GIDS conference: My Experience

Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS) was held on April 19 -22, 2011 at the green campus of IISc Bangalore. I attended the second day of conference, that was focused on Web trends and technologies. The sessions by Venkat and Harish were really good. The details of these and other sessions follow.

The conference began with “Building the next generation of experiences” by Arijit Chatterjee. Arijit is Engineering Manager for Platform Evangelism at Adobe Systems India. The trend of preferences for people is changing. Everyone wants to have better experiences, be it food, clothes or digital experiences. The experience has moved on from desktops, to laptops, to tablets and currently to smart phones. People want to have a meaningful, easy and engaging experience. There are essentially three areas of innovation in this:
1. Content authoring for the creators,
2. Customer experience management for businesses and
3. Online analytics and optimization to ensure the best value being delivered.

This session was followed by "Designing User Experiences for multi screen applications with Flash, HTML5 &CSS3" by Harish Sivaramakrishnan. Harish is a Platform Evangelist at Adobe Systems. He is also a UX design and usability expert. His talk highlighted the various devices available for communication, work etc today. The talk explored the possibility of designing the same user experience across all the different form factors i.e tablet, ipad, smart phones, desktop etc. Some practical ideas to be used by the developers to efficiently complete the coding , and the code that can be reused across all the different form factors, different screen resolutions using Adobe Flex, Flash, HTML 5 and CSS3. The programming tips and tricks were shared in these 3 platforms.

"HTML5 more than HTML5" was an interesting and thought provoking talk by Harish Vaidyanathan, who leads the evangelism efforts for Microsoft India. This session explored HTML5 and the session gave summary of HTML5 features. The session started with quick note of the logo design of HTML, and moved on to the features. Features include button curves, shadows, gradient can be done directly by coding. The button can have 4 different curve radii for 4 corners, button/ object can have shadow by placing lights .The best part is that while coding the screens can be checked by viewing in all the resolutions of different form factors. HTML5 combines the designer and developer skills and hence bridges the gap. Harish also gave aother session on "Unleashing a more beautiful web", some of the content was repetition of HTML and few features of IE 9.

"Towards a humane interface, aesthetic and usability" by Venkat Subramaniam. Venkat is the founder of Agile Developer,Inc. He has significant experience in design, architecture and development of software applications. The session gave an insight about usability in everyday interactions. Usability is more than just a “WOW” factor, it is more about making an application easier and intuitive to use. A successful application has to focus on three dimensions: business, design and usability. He gave few hilarious examples of User experience gone wrong in various products that he has come across. A spicejet check-in kiosk, Honda car to a programming language. The examples drawing to a very crucial point about Keep it Simple Stupid (KISS) rule. This was a fantastic simple session and will be sharing the presentation to MT UX community once i get my hands on it.

The conference gave insights on the changing technology and its usage. A better world of tomorrow for designers and developers .

Thanks Ankush for reviewing the draft.

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Design considerations for touch screens – Part1

Touchscreens - The Future
Touchscreens are operated as city guides, in museums, at POS (point-of-sale)stations or as kiosks(standalone advertising booths with user interaction) and now in the recent have made way into homes in the form of DPFs and Multimedia phones. Interaction has to be simple and fast as Users are often untrained. This calls for a screen and interaction design, which is considerably different from normal user
interface design.

Interaction
Touchscreens are operated with a finger or stylus. Therefore, they provide a very direct interaction - the most direct interaction that is possible on computers today. Touchscreens may be operated very fast for certain operations and require little or no training, if applications are designed adequately. For these reasons touchscreens have many uses, especially for untrained users. Many people believe that
touchscreens will replace keyboard and mouse in the future.

The Ultimate Judge is the User!
These preliminary design guidelines for touchscreens take the characteristics of touchscreens, their advantages and disadvantages, into account. Of course, these guidelines will be refined, as our experience with touchscreens grows. The ultimate judge, however, is the user. As ELO Touch Systems quote in their guidelines:

·Testing a touchscreen application on focus groups will disclose the areas that need improvement.
·If anyone pauses in confusion for even a moment, think how to improve the application.

Summary of Touchscreen Characteristics
·Speed: high
·Accuracy: low (finger), high (pen)
·Speed control: yes
·Continuous movement: yes
·Directness: direction, distance, speed
·Fatigue: high
·Footprint: no
·Best uses: point, select

Uses for Touchscreens
Best Suited to Applications Where...
·Opportunity for training is low
·Frequency of use is low
·Accurate positioning is not required
·Little or no text or numerical input is required
·Desk space is at a premium
·The environment may be chemically or otherwise "aggressive"

Not Suited to Applications...
·Requiring training/trained users
·With high-frequency use
·Requiring accuracy
·Requiring a lot of typing

Typical Touchscreen Systems
·Public information systems: Museums, city guides
·Kiosk systems: Advertising, product information
·Systems requiring pointing and selection only

Golden Rules
Speed: Make your application run fast. Speedy systems also reduce vandalism.
Intutiveness: Try to make the application intuitive.
Choices: Limit choices.
Guidance: Guide the user as much as possible.
Testing: Testing a touchscreen application on focus groups will disclose the areas that need improvement. If anyone pauses in confusion for even a moment, think how to improve the application.

This post is contributed by Mallikarjun

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Learning about Information Architecture

One of the most asked questions in discussion groups is about good references/ study material on Information Architecture, Usability etc. Here is a living list of such references:

Information Architecture:

1. IA Institute: http://iainstitute.org/en/learn/
2. Boxes and Arrows: http://www.boxesandarrows.com/ - they also have a newsletter which you can subscribe to.

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Doodle on Yahoo Messenger 5.5

The latest release of Yahoo! Messenger - version 5.5 is a significant step towards a workable and affordable electronic collaboration. We are not talking about the web cam support or the new range of emoticons that we have at our disposal, but a singular feature called 'The Doodle'.

Although, the IM Environment was present in earlier release of Yahoo! IM this one is different. Doodle allows two 'friends' to draw on a small window together. You will ask, so what? If you look back, traditionally chat software (from a user perspective) have more or less been the stylised version of the first generation or UNIX based chat applications. The earlier versions allowed users to send and receive multiple lines of text to each other, in many cases in an incoherent manner. Later, companies added capabilities to maintain friend lists and send emoticons.
However, it remained a messenger rather than growing towards a true collaborative tool.

Visual input and feedback is a critical factor in any interpersonal communication. When we speak, besides verbal communication, there is a combination of expressions, gestures and drawing on an imaginary surface. Companies tried to satisfy this need of expression through emoticons, visual feedback (although delayed) by introducing web cams. While emoticons were an instant hit, the amount of people using web cams remained restricted and often null in workplaces. The element of gestures and sketching on imaginary surfaces to explain scheme of things was missing in most of the IM software. (They are available in some high-end collaborative tools for engineering application)

Often we need to explain things to people, which can be done faster while sketching or sketches coupled with text, than illustrating it in words. Like explaining the location where you would meet your friend at your busy subway station or explaining the location of your office respective to the popular shopping mall. Besides the informational value, sketching and drawing have also been associated with self-expression and recreation for a long time. After childhood people stop drawing and sketching but they continue to doodle. From a teacher's caricature in the classroom to the boss's caricature in the boardroom, doodles have always been found to satisfy the self-expression and recreational urge.

Increasingly, products have started to address this urge as well. It started with MS Paint and has reached to picture editors in cell phones. Yahoo Doodle appears to be an attempt on similar lines. Professionals in fields like Architectural design, Engineering, Graphics, Fashion etc can benefit a great deal from this version. People can now discuss ideas by sketching it out together. When we are thinking the ideas are held in our short-term memory (STM), which works pretty much like a computer's RAM. During the thinking process it keeps exchanging information from our Long Term Memory (LTM), which works like a hard disk. To be able to think fresh and different, we should be able to keep the information in STM as fresh as possible. Sketches offer a mean to offload your brain's STM of ideas to an external medium. This makes the STM available for fresher ideas as you can always look at your sketch for reference to older ideas. Thus, adding a facility to sketch while people are chatting can encourage fresh ideas or just pure fun. This IM environment also lets you play Tic-Tac-Toe and 'connect the dots' in case you were looking for some less serious applications. There are few restrictions like how well one can draw with a mouse, absence of instant updates at the receivers end over a slow connection. A provision to copy paste existing pictures would help. Albeit the Yahoo! Doodle is a significant step towards instant electronic collaboration.

This article was first published in ZDNet on September 6, 2002.

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