Shantanu Oak

02:30 pm - Open Office Template

Honestly OpenOffice.org doesn’t come with any templates or clip art worth mentioning, but the community provides free templates that are easy to install. My favorite presentation templates are those designed by Chih-Hao Tsai:

http://technology.chtsai.org/impress/

The OpenOffice.org Repositories for Extensions and for Templates are new services organizing many useful templates.
http://templates.services.openoffice.org/en/taxonomy/term/4

It may not be intuitive to look for templates under the Extensions Repository, but many templates packs are distributed as extensions. In particular, try the Professional Template Pack I and II.

http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/SunTemplatepack_1

http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/TemplatePack_II

Once you install the template packs, start OpenOffice.org and click File – New – Templates to browse the templates. If you are printing address, mailing, shipping, CD and other types of labels, browse WorldLabel.com Label Templates.

http://www.worldlabel.com/Pages/autofillpdf-labels.htm

Current Mood: happy

02:24 pm - User Friendly Ms-Office

One of the most important change took place in the latest M$ office is that it has dumped the drop down menu system. The "ribbon" as they call it, is not bad. But see what I got when I hit Alt + H



If this is called "User Friendly" then what should be called "ugly"? This is not the right way to maintain backward compatibility!

Current Mood: disappointed

11:20 am - Usability 3.0

This is about Nirav Mehta's post on usability found here...
http://www.mehtanirav.com/2008/04/17/impressive-usability-on-the-login-page/
and the comment by Naveen, found here...
http://www.creanology.org/2008/04/usability-review/

I do not agree with either of these great men, Nirav and Naveen.
1) I will like to remove the "No, I'm a new user" link. When I want to login, I simply want to type in my username and password and hit enter! When I want to register, I look for big "Register" or "Sign Up" button with mouseover effect. As you can see, 'Sign Up' and 'Sign In' links are there at the top! Therefore it would be best to remove the 'sign up' option from 'Sign in' page.
2) I do not like the idea of using E-mail address as login. I want to use 'username' as login credential and NOT an e-mail that may change.
3) I will like the username, password input boxes integrated somewhere on the home page, instead of having a separate page for it. If space is an issue, create a mouseover/ onclick drop down box for 'Sign In' link at the top right.

You have to understand how the new users come to site, interact and judge/trust site. The users like me register with several sites before settling down with one or two really useful sites those I will like to use often. So all I look for is a quick way to login or register. The best would have been integrating with facebook or drupal or open ID so that there is no need to login at all or atleast I can use the same username and password evreywhere!

07:12 pm - Usability? What's that?

I was trying the new service launched by microsoft called healthvault.
The concept sounded interesting so I tried to log in using my Live login account at...
http://www.healthvault.com/

The next screen asked me to change my password. I didn't want to change it so I typed the same password as my new password. The next screen looked like a dead end!
I completely failed to understand the following message.

Windows Live ID
Microsoft HealthVault uses Windows Live ID to authenticate your identity. If you have a Live ID with a “weak” password, you will be asked to create a “strong” password.

I want to login to healthvault to save my blood group and blood pressure count. I do NOT want a "strong" password. I PURPOSELY keep all the passwords as "weak" since I am not going to store any confidential and true info anywhere on the site that I still don't trust. Isn't it logical? Microsoft seems to have employed double graduates and Maths wizards who decide the best algorithm on my behalf to check if my password is strong enough? Let the user go to the page that he wishes to visit. A simple usability rule has been completely ignored. I will not be visting the site again even to test it!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shantanuo/1505422203/

Current Mood: annoyed

09:24 am - Excel date conversion

Excel is normally pretty smart when it comes to importing data, and over-smart when it comes to automatically converting strings to date.
For instance, you may import information that contains text strings, such as "1- 4- 9" (without the quotes). This is fine, but if you do a Replace to get rid of the spaces, Excel automatically converts the resulting string (1-4-9) to a date (1/4/09).
Use SUBSTITUTE function instead of replace because the output of the SUBSTITUTE function is always treated as text. When you copy and paste text values, they are treated as text with no additional parsing done by Excel.

http://exceltips.vitalnews.com/Pages/T0940_Defeating_Automatic_Date_Parsing.html

Current Mood: angry

10:30 am - HTML email not want!

I wholeheartedly agree with what Jeffrey Zeldman says in E-mail is not a platform for design:

But when I say HTML mail still sucks, I don’t mean it sucks because support for design in e-mail today is like support for standards in web browsers in 1998.I mean it sucks because nobody needs it. It impedes rather than aids communication.

Current Mood: thoughtful

12:33 pm - stretch Usability

This is my comment I wanted to post on Nirav Mehta's blog entry "Make IRCTC Better".
http://www.mehtanirav.com/2007/03/08/make-irctc-better/
But I am posting it here on my blog, because I wanted to address a few usability concepts.

I tried the demo developed by Nirav's team.
http://www.mehtanirav.com/makebetter/irctc/

But firefox could not open the page because it does not support Flash (out of box). On windows XP (IE 6.0) it displayed the message...

This content requires Adobe Flash Player 9. Would you like to install it now?

I can visit the award winning flash games site like "orisinal.com" using whatever flash version I have installed. So why should I install the latest version of Flash Player 9? But I went ahead and clicked on "Yes" to install. The Flash Player 9 got installed within seconds.

I liked the design. But I will prefer if someone redo it using AJAX. The extra information on IRCTC site (like Auto Upgradation) can be hidden till the passenger really wants to read about it.

Nirav mentioned in the comment...
>> We are not suggesting to do a complete revamp
>> but at least the frontend.

I do agree with this point. The frontend needs to be smarter. It should not insist on 4 characters station name and train numbers. Do you expect the people who don't remember their wife's birthday to remember the train number of Deccan Express?
Disclaimer number 1: This is just an example to make the point clear.
Disclaimer number 2: I am not married.

Another easy way towards user centric design is to learn from customer's history. Google has introduced something like "personalized search". If IRCTC software checks my history it will see 3 Mumbai - Pune trips. The first two being second class and the last one - AC Chair class. Is it safe to assume the next trip will also be "Mumbai - Pune" AC Chair class? Another fact revealed is that I prefer afternoon trains like "Sinhagad". So why not to populate a form, ready to be clicked on "Submit"?
The personalized service can also be used to avoid fraudulent transactions. Looking at the history, it's highly unlikely that I will book Chennai - Calcutta 2 tier AC First Class ticket for four. (Unless ofcouse I am going on vacation with my family) The system should send an email or mobile alert of such high value transactions.

A web application should work like Smart Secretaries. It's better if it looks pretty too :)

If anyone is reading thus far, I will also like to point out the Fundamental Design Approach - Yahoo or Google way. The current site looks and feels like yahoo and Nirav has tried to redo it the google way. I have 2 suggestions. 1) Use AJAX, avoid Flash 2) Take care of small things like "Upgradation", "Payment Options", "Window seat" etc. It counts.
IRCTC developers team, if you are listening, my advice is - as suggested in the title of this blog post, stretch usability (a little bit), let the software be smarter and user friendly.

Current Mood: thoughtful

12:17 pm - Micro$oft excel usability issues

The problem with these kinds of solutions is that they are rarely what the user needs (or wants, or expects) which can result in a lot of frustration. In this case, my mother-in-law had to go through the document by hand and identify which dates were corrupted by this “feature”. (It turns out that she could have just changed the format of the column to text, instead of date—the data itself was not altered, just its representation—but again, that’s hardly intuitive to someone who is not very familiar with spreadsheets.)
Be predictable. Think like your users. Better yet, be your own user. It’ll be much rarer that you’ll come up a non-solution like this one.

http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/being_predictable.php

Comment: I have stopped tracking Excel frustrations I have seen over the last 10 years. I have no plans to write a book on that subject!

Current Mood: frustrated

07:36 pm

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