People Write mails that I complain a lot

There have been Anonymous mails, that I crib a lot on the products/service which I accept to use, Well every body cribs they tell it to the closest circle of influence.

Things which I look for

1. Service
2. Value for money

there have been times where the quality of service can go down, but it is up to the service representative to give back the confidence that they will get the best results.

How many times each and every one of you felt that some things are not meant to be right and why people are just ignoring it.
At-least let me speak

Technorati Tags: quality of service, crib, complain, service, value for money, customer representative, building relationship

Tails – Effortless bugtracking.

Bugtracking applications have become hellishly complicated. So complicated, and so frustrating to use, that we set out to do the job ourselves. Introducing Tails. It’s light, attractive and has just what you need to keep track of issues in your software. Without the fluff.

I have looking for bugtracking software for quiet sometime, and happened to land on this the site Angry Amoeba, who actually have worked for the website for Zyotism
The software is yet to be relased if you want to get notified, do enter your email address.

A lot of expectation is on you guys. All the best

Technorati Tags: ails, angry amoeba, zyotism, bugtracking, web 2.0

My Picasa 2 Web Albums My experience

I had been on vacation with my friends and family tour, When I came back I didn’t have option to show all the images to all my friends. Yeah I know we have lots of websites which offer you free upload of images and allow you to view them, but the toughest part was to upload all these images one after the other, that was really a pain.

I am sure most of you would have experienced the same with flickr or other website which offer you this service.

Google seems to understand the users expectation all the time. The users pain.

I had picasa installed already on my machine, After I got the invite they presented an update on Picasa, felt do I really need to update my Picasa. After I did, it was a wonderful experience.

As I too work on a product Opmanager as the User Interface Designer, I find really find the user experience approach of google to be amusing.
The minute you login to the destop version of picasa and configure the google online account with picasa you are done.
Things which were magic on the picasa desktop

1. select the images right click Choose “upload to web Album”
2. Choices you get
3. You can create a new album
4. post your images to the existing one

All selected images got uploaded successfully, with out you knowing, you could go and take cup of coffee, by that time things are done

Things which I loved on the online version

1. The Zappy thumbnail sizes offered automatically all I had was huge image which was neatly sized with respect for 3 dimension, small, medium and large
2. ( what else can I expect from the product more)
3. Oh Yeah the online Url which will let others to view the images well here is one that I experienced

Well I forgot to tell you one thing, I was able to Blog about a photo of mine right inside the Picasa desktop client.

Too good to be true. here is my
http://vinodvv.blogspot.com/
only drawback on the blogging tool is not the ability to post on other blogging sites

Technorati Tags: user experience, google, picasa, flickr, opmanager, usability

Don’t Just Stop with Website for promotion

I remember yesterday evening I was saying the same thing to DevAnand, If Opmanager MSP needs to come to top in search engine you need more people to talk about Opmanager MSP in the blogs and you more potential customers on the website.

Why Blog? why not just google ads? Website Keywords, description etc ?
Simple there are other sites which are more popular than your websites, Where more people come there to collaborate, discuss, talk, express and what not. If more people are going to talk about your product, more the response you get from technorati. so you listing gets improved in Google or other search engines like yahoo, MSN

Do remember Yahoo is still the KING and then google after which is MSN.

Here is a little stat on what helped this Blog hits go up.

To name a few

1. Delicious
2. Technorati
3. Digg
4. Furl
5. fark

And here is nice article which on the Yahoo News which gives an idea Why blogs also helps?

PS: for those who don't know what OpManager is "Opmanager is Network monitoring Software" which is under the brand name ManageEngine and is a product of Adventnet , in short terms it is nothing but a – Mapping – Monitoring – Alerting – Reporting tool. if you need to know more about the software you check this link of opmanager, Opmanager MSP is another flavour for the MSP (Managed Service Provider) and the link is right here.

Technorati Tags: website, blogs, website promotion, technorati, digg, furl, delicious, google, yahoo, msn, opmanager, opmanager msp, adventnet, manageengine

Camera Phone A Handy tool for a blogger

A Picture is worth more than a thousand words

The above Image was taken from my Camera mobile Phone, as I was in the middle of traffic and I saw a APSRTC ( AndraPradesh state road transport corporation) Bus which was really looking good, not just the Bus, its Driver was in complete Attire. Well that was a Air conditioned Bus, I guess our Chennai City transport drivers can’t even think of wearing this suite in the hottest Summer.
click on the image to view the big image.

Hope you bring you some good shots of the chennai city, which will be real fun.

Technorati Tags: Camera Mobile Phone, Camera, Mobile Phone, Picture is worth thousand words, summer

Credit cards VS Pizza – Rate of Interest VS Rate

Why that in India, they charge 2.75% PM (PM- per month) as Rate of Interest?
And remember most of cards are International ones like citibank, hsbc, standard chartered, Abn Amro and more. When we are talking about International market as a playground, Why Indians are made to pay a huge transaction charge. Take the same card in the US what would be the charge.

Aren't Indians paying more in the international market.
When my friend from US comes here, he is so happy to use his credit card in India, the reason is low interest rates.

On the contrary?

You have heard about the Pizza Corner, Pizza hut and other in the Indian market which made it entry recently. Have you checked their bills for same variety and quantity of pizza they offer, the price is different.The same international pizza which is offered has a variation in prize. The Pizza hut is costly in chennai because they are international company and Pizaa corner was able to gel with the Indian society by starting a new company in India as "Pizza corner India Ltd". Which actually lowered the sales tax.

Why is the Indian Government keeping quiet on this?
Imagine a quiet a number of Credit card holders pay higher rate of Interest, and an Hungry Indian guy still can't affford to buy his lunch at Pizza Hut, well the later was a joke.

Technorati Tags: India, International, Credit cards, Pizza, Rate of Interest

Seems Like I am wrong with Ipod

I had made a post little long back, and here is the link
On which I had stated that people have been looking for the Ipod with the microphone so that they can record voice, Well Apple has listened to their fans I guess, here is the link at Gizmodo which talks about the XtremeMac MicroMemo

Technorati Tags: ipod, apple, Video Ipod, XtremeMac Micromemo, Gizmodo

Why Blogs is a Hit, than Forums and Web site

I have been asking lately why I see a huge shift in the way I look at the world. When I worked in my previous company, all I knew was website, Multimedia presentation etc and had nothing to do with Blogs or forums.
There can couple of reasons why I didn't know about Blogs
One of the best I see is after the Bubble burst, more and more people started to think of communicating to others where it was just text based (typo), rather than complex design and navigation like the website design. In simple words people felt "cut the crab, say it straight"

Forums was not personal, you could flame some one on the list. Website too much time ( home page and then the next page ) , Blogs straight to the heart.

If I analyse my website with my blogs, I know which one draws more attention
So what would be next biggest thing after Blogs

Technorati Tags: Blogs, website, personal homepage, site, website, forums, presentation , multimedia, Bubble burst

Style of Blogging

Two ways of expressing your views

1. Direct – not that great, not interesting sometimes
2. Indirect – divert the user, relate with something common/interesting

If you look at my previous post "Buggy Code is Like Girlfriend or Wife" I tried the indirect method, I got inspiried from the picture of the post "Can marketing be honest AND motivating?" by Kathy Sierra. But it conveys a different meaning altogether. I tried a different approach to make my post interesting.

Hope you like my new approach

Technorati Tags: Bloggging, style, creative, creative writing

Communication – is it usability

Wikipedia – Communication

Can it be also said as "common way to express your views so that other person can understand the message what you are trying to convey."

So what is the message, is what matters for 2 kind of people.

1. The marketing/presenter
2. The viewer/customer

 If you take internet as the medium for communication, so what are the ways to communicate

1. Text /typo
2. Graphics
3. Sound/voice
4. Animation/CGI

above all in the navigation/usability, sounds like I trying to give you a definition for Multimedia.

 If you notice I have mentioned what makes a better communication is usability. What makes all the ways (text, graphics, sound,animation) usable. Most designers and developer make the common mistake in communicating. combination of text with graphics gives 60% readable, how about addition of usability to make it 100%

Designers: think that use of graphics, text etc makes the screen usable

Developers: feel that adding additional functionality makes things usable.

Well both are partly correct, And both of them forget to determine which comes first, which comes as action for the user and what is the end expected result. 

Let me illustrate a simple example

Option 1

Option 2

Option 3

part 1

part 2

with the mouse toggle on the arrow would bring up the login screen

or

Option  4
Login  Click here

Just a text link which would take the user to detailed login page. 

So what would be the idea Communication for the above login if the site was

1. webbased email hotmail, gmail, yahoo mail
2. photo gallery site like flickr
3. Blog like wordpress, blogspot

This is left for the designers and developers to think?
Well I have suggested the sites go check yourself how is the navigation/presentation. Most companies spend lot of money on usability, it is up the designers or developers to see and learn from the well known sites.

These are questions which the designer or developer needs to think 

1. What could we give a user-experience to the user instead of the normal way of login
2. What would happen if the user clicks on the username text-field, how would the system validate the information and how would the error response would be shown makes the complete communication.

It is not the way the GUI or the functionality makes the communication, it is the navigation which gives the completes communication

So designers and developers have to give a thought before GUI/functionality  development. Now a days companies expect the designers and developers to have an additional role called the usability on their shoulders.