September 2006 Archives

Every morning we get a "Thought for the day" in our inbox from our HR/admin team. I especially loved today's thought.

“If you want something
you never had,

do something that you
have never done.

 

Don’t go the way life
takes you.

Take the life the way
you go.

 

And remember you are
born to live and

not living because you are
born.”

Usability is my new obsession. Even after over three decades of the beginning of the personal computing revolution, we are completely inept at producing usable software. What is worst is that inspite of this, we - the engineers - simply refuse to acknowledge the importance of interaction design. No sir! What we care about is new progamming languages, code optimizations, scalable software and fancy terms like AJAX, RIA and RoR. User interface ranks right at the bottom, just below writing readable code and just above remembering to take a bath.

The perception amongst engineers that user interface is unimportant is a worrying trend. I think this attitude is a little bit more prevalent in India because traditionally Indian services companies have primarily been involved in building server side enterprise software. This is the kind of software that often runs without any interface or has an interface that is visible to very few technically savvy people. So historically, all the important development was handed off to the best engineers while the newbies were consigned to building the UI. The after effects of this linger on even today when we are working more and more on consumer facing products. The user interface is the single most important reason for success or failure of any product in this domain. Take, for example, this article about the increase in sales a travel site saw after they redesigned their site (http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article3330.asp):

Following major site redesign work, MyTravel, one of the UK's leading holiday and leisure groups with brands including Airtours, Going Places and Mytravel.com, is reaping significant improvements in online sales.

The three-phase redesign, developed in partnership with Foviance, has already resulted in a 20% increase in online booking conversion following the completion of the first two phases. Work on the third phase is to commence later this month.

The first phase, which went live in December, reduced booking times by up to 40% by simplifying the number of steps needed to book from eight to five. This resulted in a 10% improvement in conversion levels across all MyTravel's websites.

So far most software companies in India have been reluctant to invest in developing interaction design expertise. This has in turn, meant that interaction design is a profession few understand and even fewer choose to pursue. This is unforuntate because we lose all the creative talent to other disciplines like advertising, toy design, corporate branding etc. If we want to build truly world class products, we must start to understand the importance of usability. We must make a concerted effort to make it a glamorous, high paying career oppurtunity. Just like we work hard to attract technical talent, we need to work hard to attract creative talent. Believe me, the "creative types" are scared of us engineers. They think we dont understand them and dont appreicate them. We have to tell them its not true! We love you guys! Please come work with us!

Bonus link: So you want to be an interaction designer?

Man, I am bummed! I am seriously perturbed by a rather silly little thing. There is this movie which everybody is raving about - Munnabhai-II. I saw this movie a couple of weeks back and hated it. Ok not hated it, but definitely did not like it. It is one those sugar coated feel good movies which are nothing like real life. I watched the movie right after it released and kind of assumed that it will be a flop. But lo behold, everybody and their mother in law are going ga ga over the movie! I mean, people are discussing the movie like its the answer to all their problems. Its a hit and I can barely find anybody else who did not like the movie. I am hearing things like "it changed my outlook to life". Hello? Are we talking about the same movie here?

Now it is not such a big deal of course. But I am very puzzled as to why I did not like this movie. I am a movie buff and I can sit through most crap that would make normal people doze off. And I am a Gandhi fan and Gandhism is the theme of this movie (their portrayal is not quite correct but thats another story). So now I am wondering if I am too cynical to like feel good movies. I think I am an optimist by nature - entrepreneurs have to be to optimistic! I liked some other feel good movies before - Forrest Gump, for example. So what is it about this movie that I couldnt stand it? Its silly but its definitely puzzling me. If you watched the movie and didnt like it, please leave a comment. It will make me feel better! ;-)

UPDATE: OK so I watched it again! And I agree its not such a bad movie after all. Not as good as I had expected it to be based on the first one. But not that bad too! Thanks for the comments. The vociferous support for the movie was one reason I gave it one more chance :)

The latest version is live now! We got lot of feedback on the old UI and have made an effort to clean up navigation and user interface. A lot more is in the pipeline but 1.1 is a big step forward from 1.0. Do check it out!

This was the email signature of the recruiter who brought me to Microsoft. These words have stuck with me ever since and we use them often to describe our philosophy as a company. Last to last Friday was a good example of the "play hard" part. We had a great party in office. Manish (who btw is finally blogging again!) has a great writeup on it. It was one of those days when everybody was in their elements. Everybody had something funny to say, everybody had a witty retort ready and everybody was ready to laugh at the silliest jokes. Truly memorable and fun!

I have been told a few times that as a company, we have a little too much fun. That might be true. In the last month or so, we made a trip to Jaipur, and had two big birthday bashes. Besides that, on days when a lot of us are working late, we often end up ordering food from outside and end up having a small impromptu after-hours party.

So yes, maybe we are partying too much. But its not a bad thing. Because for all the fun and frolic that you might find on our flickr feed, what doesn't show up is the hard work that happens rest of the time. As a team, we always take our deadlines very seriously. In fact the last party was postponed by a week because a couple of us had to meet some client deadlines. We have ended up working all nights on our birthdays. We have spent many a Sundays cranking out software. We have woken up early and stayed up late to take client calls. If we are partying hard, its because we are also working hard!

I think this is the best part of being in a startup with a young team. There is so much passion and energy all around. Besides this kind of fun and masti is a privilege of a small team. When you grow big, events take longer to organize, require budget approvals, prior planning is needed and you don't really know half the people in the party. Friday's party took just  a day's worth of planning. We ordered food and drinks and we were ready to rock-n-roll! It was one cozy group eating, drinking and making merry.

I am sure one day when (God willing!) we are big and famous and stuff, we will look back at these times and miss them. TeknoKrats - these are the "good old days" which you are going to talk about tomorrow! So until tomorrow comes, lets work hard, play hard and make history! The joy is in the journey!

People Aggregator V1.1 is coming this week! This release is all about improving the user interface and site navigation. Lots of bug fixes and some new features too! Stay tuned!

Entrepreneurship is about defying odds. And if you think that odds are stacked against you, then wait till you read this amazing story of Sharathbabu who rose from the slums of Chennai to become a successful entrepreneur.

When you constantly worry about the next square meal, you do not dream of becoming a doctor or an engineer. The only thing that was on my mind was to get a good job because my mother was struggling a lot.

We bitch a lot about our education system and how flawed it is (I am actually writing a seperate blog post on it!). But inspite of its flaws, occasionally it manages to support and produce gems like Sharathbabu. Without all the scholarships, education of many such deserving people would be impossible. For once, taxpayer money is being put to good use!