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How not to do password input?
If there is one thing I don’t look forward to when I buy a new device is the setting up, especially entering passwords to the websites and apps I use. We are all encouraged by the tech giants to have long and difficult passwords for security reasons, but I feel they don’t do enough to make the process convenient (note that I am not saying easy which is associated with being easy for the bad actors as well) for us to use. Yes, there are efforts like Microsoft Account Phone sign-in which allows you to do password less logging in, but they are not available always and are not supported…
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An open letter to Facebook - what is a story, and do we need it?
Dear Facebook, Please understand that not everyone is as smart as your product managers, I am not. I don’t understand the UI for the “Your Story” feature on the web. When I see a notification that a friend has posted a new story, I click and I get a weird looking “mobile” like window which goes away even before I can read the whole post or story or text or whatever you are calling it today. And, if I reply to a story, I am unable to figure out where it went. If the “Story” is having a video, why am I not given any of the controls – to…
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Simple thing that I am finding amiss with Amazon India and PayTM
This week I encountered two examples of how even the giants in e-commerce have a lot towards improving the usability of their apps. The first was with Amazon India. You expect the Internet juggernaut to have perfected the whole online shopping pipeline, yet I found there was a bug in the invoice that was displayed – Amazon engineers might argue it is a feature, but for me, a consumer it is a bug. The below invoice should be showing for the second item, the amount which should 2 * unit price (₹834), instead it was wrongly showing the unit price (₹417) alone, not taking into account the quantity. I got…
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Software design, little has changed in the last 70 years
On 19 February 1946 Alan Turing designed the first well-known software for a stored-program computer. Seventy years later, each of us is carrying numerous apps (software) in our pockets and wrists. Software today can be incredibly powerful, they contain millions of lines of code, can guide nuclear missiles to their target, and even recognize the human voice and translate them on the fly. Today’s mobile apps like Microsoft Word or Facebook are more complex than the entire software stack that powered Apollo 11 spaceflight. The technology powering Apple’s Siri, Google Now or Microsoft’s Halolens were impossible even ten years before. The growth in areas like Cloud Computing, Big Data, Machine…
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Pill bottle design–Talk by Deborah Adler in Mix ‘09
I saw this in a talk, two-and-half years back during Microsoft Mix ‘09 conference on User Experience by Deborah Adler. I wanted to blog about it then but somehow seemed to have missed it. Her talk followed the IE 8.0 keynote. Ms Adler is a smart young UX designer whose prescription packaging system simplified the design of Pill bottles & information presented in that. It also reduces the chances of the wrong usage of pills and the resulting complications. The design was adopted by Target Pharmacies and is marketed under their ClearRX brand. I found the idea of improving on an everyday problem to be quite impressive & encouraging. Check…
