The iPad is an appliance not a computer & you should be happy about that

Picture this.





You've spent ten straight hours hunched over the laptop/desktop at work, hammering out code/composing a TPS report or whatever it is that you do at work that involves the use of a computer.





You've reached home. Now, you settle into the couch & want some relief. You pick up your home laptop/netbook to read a Dilbert comic strip to see the humor in your incredibly obtuse manager or the nefarious cost cutting.





Instead, you see the Virus Scanner reporting 3 new viruses found. Or that your disk has run out of space & needs defragmenting. Or, there are 16 new updates in the OS & you need to patch the OS. Now.





Tell me truthfully, do you look forward to this?





You maybe a Unix hacker by the day, but hey, this is entertainment! Do you tinker with the frequency bands in your TV everyday? Do you try to optimize the sound bitrate in your stereo? No? 





I've been using an iPod Touch since November 2009. I've been using a home desktop & an office laptop during the same period. When I want to play a racing game or quickly check my email on my iPod, I have yet to face a scenario like the one mentioned above.





And I'm glad about that, however much I may love tinkering with technology.





So, if the iPad is a 'dumb' device that doesn't allow installing software and isn't letting you hack away at it's internals, why bother? It's a radio, a TV, a car. Use it for a few hours and forget about it. 





Enough said.

Sherlock Holmes (2009) & why you need to be a House M.D. fan to 'get it'

Sherlock Holmes (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0988045/) is a re-imagining of Arthur Conan Doyle's detective, played indelibly by Jeremy Brett (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Brett) for the 4 Granada television series. Jeremy Brett to me is the quintessential Holmes. Perfect down to the last bone. I'm a confessed Sherlock Holmes fanboy and I've read no other detective series as exhaustively as I have read Holmes. 

Therefore, I figured it would be quite interesting to observe my reaction to Guy Ritchie's adaptation, given his fearsome reputation for making movies that resemble the blunt objects with which the characters murder each other. 

So I saw Sherlock Holmes. Once. Twice. And loved it! What's going on here? For anyone who is even a minor Sherlock Holmes fan would be horrified at Holmes' filthy appearance (not matching with Conan Doyle's description of Holmes' love for 'cat like cleanliness'), horrified that Holmes has had flings with Irene Adler (although Conan Doyle does say she was the only woman who 'mattered' to him). 

For one, Holmes fan or not, Sherlock Holmes (2009) is fun. Like Congo (1995) [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112715/] is fun. 

The next thing is the casting. Robert Downey Jr. (RDJ) is on fire these days and I am a fan. Iron Man has grown on me & RDJ was hilarious in Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0942385/). Jude Law plays Watson and looks Watson and is perfect.

But what's the hidden sauce here? It's House M.D. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0412142/)believe it or not. House M.D. is based entirely on Sherlock Holmes. Only, House is not a detective, but a doctor. Watson is called Wilson. House even stays at 221B! And House M.D. reinvented Sherlock Holmes to me. After I had seen the last of the Jeremy Brett series and longed for more, House M.D. came in and filled the gap. But wait, this Holmes was different! He was still analytical, the 'grand templar of rationality' and so on. But he was also different. He stole Wilson's clothes, his money, played pranks and manipulated people. He had little flings and bickered with Wilson.

Sherlock Holmes (2009) is as influenced by House M.D. as Casino Royale was by the Bourne Series. In both cases, we have a new interpretation that brings colour to the franchise. When I was watching Sherlock Holmes, I felt like I was watching an extended episode of House, same as when I was watching Casino Royale, I felt I was watching Bourne. 

So, I like the new Holmes & Watson and their world. The purists might snort at the new beginnings  and say it 'cheapens' things, but I argue that this is Holmes for the twenty first century, even though the movie is set in a different era.

So, go watch it! And then, start watching House M.D. I started in November, 2004 & haven't been able to stop since! 

Why the iPad is for old people? (Not the diaper, the device)

Various tech pundits have said that, the newly released iPad is for 'older people'. http://gizmodo.com/5458855/the-apple-ipad-is-for-old-people.

I'm trying to hazard a guess as to why that is so.

You see I attended this talk recently. http://www.upabangalore.in/mwiki/mediawiki-1.15.1/index.php?title=Jan_2010_talk. One of the speakers outlined the concept of Personas in design. These are dummy people, with character & quirks & needs & wants that designers setup & then test against. 

Who is the Persona numero uno at Apple? One Mr.Steven P Jobs. It is anecdotal that Apple builds what 'Steve wakes up and wants looking at his mirror'. Any surprise then, that the iPad makes the oldies happier than the rest? Or is supposed to? 

Do I buy the fact that the iPad is for oldies? I'm not sure I do. But this seems to lend credence to the beliefs of those who do.

My take on the "User Experience research tools, IA case studies, and overview of London UX scene" @ Yahoo! Bangalore last week

As an aside, we had difficulty entering the conference room where the talk was on. This is so because the organizer(s) didn't mention a contact person name/venue details. You can't pick faults with free & interesting talks, but this would greatly improve the UX of any further talks :-)

To the talk now. The central point of the talk(s) were the cultural differences between European & Asian audiences & therefore the impact of these subtleties on UX design. UX is User eXperience, for the uninitiated.

What I picked from the talk - 

- Details of how designers design. HINT: They create Personas.

- Details on how large companies, e.g. Vodafone address cultural subtleties so their Product people, sitting in one geography can design products & services for everyone. 

Personas

Dr. Anxo Cereijo Roibás described how designers go about designing. They create Personas. They collect a great deal of information about people using their product. Then they gradually group all of this into a Persona, name that Persona & use a limited collection of Personas to design. This helps focusing the design to the needs to specific people rather than specific spreadsheets.

Ethnographic Research for UX

Vodafone picked three countries - Egypt, India & South Africa to gauge user behavior w.r.t to new services. 

They had two sets of people in mind. One, the top & middle of the pyramid. English speaking users with smartphones. The objective was to test user expectations for the use of social networking applications using mobile phones.

They had two types of tasks. One, where they had SMS's sent to the users with requests to respond immediately with information - Where are you? What do you see? How do you feel about that? 

The test users sent back responses either through SMS or through MMS (if the answer required a photo/video).

The other type of tasks were more deliberate & needed planning. 

One interesting thing they came up with, with this research is the concept of a map in the mind of the Indian user. It's more to do with a general lay of the land & a bunch of landmarks, rather than precise directions like you see in Google Maps.


Surprise, surprise. Google Maps this week released an update to Google Maps for India, based on this very concept! http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/go-thataway-google-maps-india-learns-to.html


The bottom-of-the-pyramid users were administered the tasks by local researchers, since many had not even heard of a mobile phone. 


Some interesting findings:

• When asked how they would create a profile for themselves, that other people could see, most came up with a design that looked like a Facebook profile! Complete with a photo at the top corner.
• A lot of people wanted a 'service' through which they could list the skills they had, so others could find them and give them work to do. There seems to be a gaping hole in the Rural Job Classifieds market!
• A lot of people indicated they would like some way to maintain bank accounts using mobile phones, given that it would be hard/impossible to do so in any other way.

So, all in all, this was a nice session with some key learning. Looking forward to more. Bravo! Yahoo! for doing this!