HFI Certification

I was waiting for a courier since last one month which I received it yesterday. I received my HFI certificate and stamp. I reached at home late evening. There were two couriers from HFI, one from Bangalore and one from Mumbai. I guessed one is a certificate and the other one is stamp.

I opened the certificate and it was a nicely laminated, shiny, thick certificate wrapped in two envelopes. I felt good reading my name on it.

I was more interested in the other package. I opened the box and found a stamp inside. I was impressed with the first sight of it. I checked the stamp from all the sides and felt the smooth surface of it. I took out some of the papers and stamped my name on it. I looked at the paper and my name on it.

After some time, suddenly a thought came in to my mind that this stamp is of no use for me. Where and when I am going to use it? What was the point sending this stamp to a person who works in the digital world and has hardly done any paper work since last so many years? How many of CUA’s have used it and how many times?

My expectations were something different. They would have provided a something like below image with name and certification name on it, which would have a hair band pin on the other side which we would have carried in the office wearing it on our shirts. We would have carried it to all Usability Conferences.

More thought should have gone through this gift.

What do you think?

Linked in-Sign in Problem

Why do I need to click Sign in button twice to be into Linked in?

I was expecting this to be corrected long back but seem that Linked in people didn't observe this problem or is it something I have misunderstood the flow?

Once I come on the homepage, I am asked either to join or sign in as shown red in below image. 

As I have saved the email and password, once clicked the Sign in link, it needs to navigate me to my page, but instead it shows another page to sign in as shown.

iMindMap...tool to plan, study, create, present and organise your things...an Overview

What I liked about iMindMap...

1. Very Easy to start your plan and notes in iMindMap
2. Easy to remember and learn
3. Easy to use the menus and icons at the top
4. Various Export options
5. Nice and large icons
6. Options to view the map with different options
7. Colored branches
8. Text size varies depending upon the level of branching. For higher level..large font size
9. You can plan your project
10. Shortcuts
11. Satisfied with the output

http://www.thinkbuzan.com/intl/home

Where I stumbled upon...

1. When full screen view is activated, I couldn't go back to normal view. I had to look for online help to get the normal view. The answer is toggle Ctrl+F11
2. When fullscreen view, only icons are displayed which are difficult to remember which action does it perform
3. Need to wait on each icon to appear the tooltip, which sometimes takes considerable time to appear

 

Saving 2 emil IDs in Hotmail

I sent a reply to my friend through Hotmail to his two different IDs. One is official and another personal. A screen appeared to save the email IDs with smart text boxes where IDs were already present and few empty boxes where I suppose to enter the name of my friend.

Just to check what error does Hotmail gives, I entered same name for both the addresses to save in my list. And to my great surprise it gave me an option to combine the email IDs. Also it moved the personal ID under Personal email Address heading and another under Official email Address header. That was done very intelligently. It made me happy :)

Problem with Windows Media Player 9.0

I have two media players on my machine, Windows media player (Default) and Media Player Classic. Usually I watch the movies on Media Classic Player.

Once I wanted to watch a movie. I double clicked and it opened in windows player which I didn't noticed. I was watching it in full screen mode. I continued till I paused it to note down some instructions. There my frustration started.

To pause the movie in Windows Media Player I pressed "Space bar" for about 2-3 times but couldn't succeed so I used mouse where I needed to do it at the bottom bar. I did not want to exit from full screen mode. It happened 3-4 times.

I quit the windows media player and started watching the movie into my favorite Classic player where I could toggle the pause/play at one "Space bar" press.

Media Player Classic gives me a lot of flexibility and is much more compact.

Taxi Meter in Abu Dhabi

I was in Abu Dhabi for a small project during May-June 2010. There were so many things I was impressed with. One of them was taxi service.

The service is managed by private companies who selects the drivers from different regions (India/Pakistan/Bangladesh etc). Once the driver passes 2 driving exams (which is veeee...ry tough) he is allowed to work in the city. He can work as much as he wants as the taxi remains with him 24 hrs. They work on commission basis. Daily they need to give 300-350 Dhs to the owner and rest is their earnings.

The taxi meter were very self explanatory. When you board on taxi, meter shows the display on meter and the red light on top of the taxi to know the people who are waiting at taxi/bus stand.

It shows the details like the taxi Drivers Photo, Name, License Number, distance traveled in km, time since boarding, instructions to fasten the seat belts, recording card inside the meter to record all the conversation, day/night, whether taxi is waiting or on road and fare. Customer need not to ask anything about the fare :)

Click on image to read

 
There is an instructions sticker at the same side to all the taxis where you get to know the minimum charges, day and night charges and charges per km and all the information the passenger might need.

I Love.......Crome's Paste and Go...

I love this Google Crome's feature "Paste and Go" on its location bar. It saves one click white pasting a URL.

I Love.......Scribd Status

I was uploading a document on Scribd and I loved the status update they provided. It showd a count down of the documents which were in queue and the status was getting updated very fast.

In below image red circled number showing the document status...

My smart eraser

During my summer vacation after 12th exams, I joined a drawing class at Chandrakant Mandare Art Gallery. He was a well known Marathi Actor and artist. He taught us a powder shading technique to draw portraits. During that training we learned so many useful drawing techniques.

One of them is…
 

To erase a small part of line drawing or to give a highlight in dark shaded area we use to use eraser and eventually erasing the adjacent lines. In case of putting the highlights using eraser, it was more frustrating as it used to erase the other part of drawing which was not desirable.

See below images. A sliced piece of eraser is fixed into ball pen’s body to serve as a tip. You can call it as an eraser pen.

1)    This method was very effective, useful and was very convenient to erase from parts like eyes, eyelashes and shades of hair without spoiling the drawing. (For detail parts check drawing section at http://www.pradipkhekare.com)
2)    As it is a pen, it gives accurate results. The area adjacent to the eraser tip is visible on paper which is not with regular rectangle eraser.
3)    And most important, it feels GOOD!

Strange things in my office

In every office you can find these strange things.

We have cubical system in our office where multiple project teams sit. There is a common switch board for entire hall, where the switches are laid out horizontally as shown below.

The lighting preference for every project group is different. Some wants a particular light to be on or off. So to switch a particular light, we need to check all the switches to get the results as there is absence of natural mapping in between switches and lights. (Usually we face this issue either at home, office or somewhere else)

The design solution would be very easy and would require little common sense. Make the groups of the switches according to the layout of the office. On broad level there could be four different groups. Left, Right, Top and Bottom.

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Now see the below image. What is a problem with this? Apparently there is no problem with the water cooler. When you go and try to take the water, you need to bend a lot till your water bottle is full, though its a good exercise:)

Easy solution, make a base for cooler so that we can comfortably take the water.

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One common example is of doors which opens inside. There is a vertical bar to pull/push the door. On the outer side of the door has an instruction “PUSH” and inside side has “PULL”.  Sometimes the instructions are absent leading to more confusion.

Here the same handle design is used to do two different functions pull and push (Like my speaker buttons), which leads to confusion. Can’t we design it in such a way that we get to know which side to push and which side to pull without instructions?