I was reading about Ed Kohler's post about social networking update redundancy.

I think there can be a simple solution. To do this we may need a simple new standard format of data syndication, which can be a simple derivative of RSS. Basically every individual can have a personal RSS feed.

A person shall provide an input socket (it can be a XML-RPC based system, which already is used by WordPress and several other blogs) when he signs up with any social networking sites or any website where he might update his personal data or make comments or blog posts. These sites can have a system to push the information to this personal RSS feed, which can be the only RSS feed that your friend need to subscribe to know all the latest news about you or your company. I understand that when all data is pushed to the same personal RSS feed, redundancy can be controlled by smart pattern matching algorithm (may be simply matching the heading to start with).

I think this technical solution might work

Blogs have fueled the growth of peer-to-peer information flow in form of news, knowledge packets, ideas and individual point-of-views. However it has also resulted in "Information overload" which drives a normal person nut as he is at risk to wasting too much time reading the flesh before he reaches the crust.

Learning becomes more difficult as we face a situation where we have less time and most if it is wasted while absorbing the excess information and then an equal amount of effort (if not more) is required to skim the real message out of it.

A hot debate is going on at – http://guydz.com/moneypowerwisdom/?p=19

I personally think:

A summary can solve all the problem. There are people who understand the concept in few words. They hate to read through long articles to get that “dosage” of knowledge.

However, there are lots of people who might have difficulty in understanding the concept. There may be several people who might not accept a point of view unless backed with examples from real life.

Therefore both formats are required in my opinion.

Now the question is – On a media like blog, do we have enough time to summarize the ideas that we put together?

 What do you think?

How many times have you heard?

• He is successful because he has the first mover advantage.
• I have a bright idea. I will seek venture funding and make it BIG!
• There are so many simmilar businesses around? There will be a lot of competition for my new business.

I bet, you must have come across a variant of one of these statements.

They all signify the general perception that a unique idea (or a first mover advantage, or an invention) is the core of a business. Actually this is not true.

Ideas are important. In fact, a business to keep its edge in the industry need to keep re-inventing itself and come up with new ideas, variance, reasons-to-do-business-with and disruptive trends to gain a leading position or maintain his leadership.

Ideas are the fundamental inputs for running a business. They are nothing special. If you cannot think out of the box, or come up with something unique on an ongoing basis, forget about succeeding in this cut-throat competitive economy. It is not for the light hearted ones.

But hold on. The process is execution! There cannot be an output without the process. The output will remain equal to the input if there is no process! It is a pity to see so many people burn midnight oil and hundreds of hours in defining, refining and protecting their idea, but they hardly take the first step forward to execute the same.

History is full of examples where visionary companies have emerged from innovation and smart execution of ideas which were conceived by someone else or invented by someone else.

• Microsoft didnt invented operating systems
• Apple didnt invented GUI
• Google was not the first search engine
• Dell was not the first desktop manufacturer
• Infosys was not the first outsourcing company
• Dhirubhai Ambani didnt set up the first polyster manufacturing unit in the world

The list is endless..

What these guys did and what is important is: See the Gap!

Nothing is perfect. Things happen in a given way which is good, may be better, but never the best. You can always better the effort by finding the gap what makes it imperfect. For a moment think of an "ideal scenario" and how it differs from what you are seeing today in a given context. Are you happy with everything? You cannot be. Its a utopian scenario.

If you see with a consumers' point of view, you will be able to see a gap almost everywhere, everytime and with everything! So if you want to really make the next big search engine – find the gap – find the pain – find the imperfection. And hey – you have an idea! It's so easy.

Now whats next!

• Validate your idea. See if it offers value to its stakeholders and create win-win synergy?
• Plan for the execution of the idea, but keep yourself flexible about its implementation and nitty-grittys.
• Plan for the risks. Risks can never be avoided. They can be managed.
• Set achievable targets and take youir first step.

All this really means – Take action!

So, when you can create idea at random (like an idea factory), you can always differenciate. And when you can differenciate and make things better – go ahead and do it. Take action.

Take baby steps. But try to walk. And soon you will be able to run.

Microsoft was a visionary company. It saw the potential in the business of operating systems. It harnessed its power and made it available for masses in form of DOS. They marketed it well and went on from becoming an innovator (mind you – not an inventor) to a world class company.

Google found that people are not getting the right results and they feel frustrated while searching for what they want on internet. They deviced algorithm which solved the problem. I bet when they started off, it was not a code as complex as you will have in spaceships! But they kept innovating, removing gaps as they saw them.

Social networking concept was initially mastered by a site called Friendster. However there are many more websites who have followed the same fundamental principle and improvised on that to achieve more fame and hiher valuation.

I am like a friend to most of my clients. When I speak to them, I always have this advice at the back of my mind. I advise them to do things differently to make it better in small increments based on those small ideas that you can generate at your will. To start taking the first steps towards a better web-application or a better business model. I am a strong advocate of compunding of small improvements done over a period of time to result in a considerable net effect.

So, its all about seeing the gap. Building small bridges and walking over them to leave your competition behind.

I look forward to see you all at the top at the game – ahead of the guys who invented the same.

Best of luck!

I recently came across a signup form. It was not bad, but could have been much better. Here is an evaluation of the same so that others can avoid the mistakes that has occured in this signup form.

It was a quick review. If you can find out something notable, feel free to post.

PS: Excuse the poor image quality. My Adobe Photoshop elements got stuck. This was the best I could salvage out Did not had enough courage to do the entire review again.

Abhishek

I came across a Web2.0 website called ProjectStat.us (Trying to express that it has something to do with project status – a nice cool trick). I liked the overall concept and was curious to find out how it works. So I decided to sign up.

I filled up the Signup form and clicked on "Create Account" with great expectations and this is what I got!

So, I can only provide a five digit zip code and a two digit state code. I do not have the right to submit my country! The product / service seems to be targetting the global audience. Then why considering only US data set?

I again pressed "Create Account" with much anticipation..
And I got..

Now it says that the login name that I chose is already in use. It is poor form validation which does not show unavailability of login name in the first check and when you correct the remaining information, it talks about unavailability of login name.

I took another chance and typed in my full name abhishekrungta as the desired login name.
And I got this…

Now it says that my Login name is too long. phew..

BTW, I didnt give up. I tried one last time with a different Login name which is short and "should have been available". I got an error screen showing "

I do not understand the rational behind such checks when they are not going to make a big difference in the application. They just harass a user and causes confusion. This is truly a usability nightmare and deserves a position in this column.

In my opinion a form should be short and simple, with minimum validation (validate only those data which is absolutely important) and a flexible data structure to accomodate cultural and geographical diversity.

It happens to me every time..
I am in an elevator which is going up, and it will stop at a floor in transit and a guy will peep in his head asking if the elevator is going down!

10 seconds wasted!
Think of the frustration if it happens five times during one ascent.

I am not sure, who is at fault?
- the guys who press both the [up] and the [down] buttons near the elevator OR
- the company which designed the elevator

If this is about the guys, then they must not be "software engineers" (90% of the companies are software companies in the building in which we are housed). I am very much worried about the quality of code based on their understanding of "how things work"

If this is about the company and the designer of the elevator (which Don Norman will generally like to say because he says in his "Design of Everyday Things" that users are not stupid and it is normally the fault of the designer of the product) then why did we adopted such a flawed design and have standardized it all over the world!

I am confused. Do you have an answer?
Or this only happens in India? Or worse, Does it only happens with me?

I was trying to think out – What is the most important soft skill in life?

Some options I came across:
Communication? Public speaking? Problem solving? Team management? Time management?

The list was getting too long!

I tried to find a common thread which underlines several soft skills which came to my mind. I zeroed upon something which can be described as - "ability to take neutral view-points" to be the most important  of all. Communication is an integral part of our personal and professional life. To interact and understand the communication and to respond in an appropriate way, it is most important for a person to be able to see things from various viewpoints and understand the reason behind an action. Only when we understand the reason behind someone's action, we can modify our approach to get the desired result from the person we are dealing with.

A person should be able to put himself in place of the other person and see how will he feel or how will he react to a given situation. This skill can be very important for people who work in communication-centric jobs like sales and marketing, public relations, teaching, project management.

The root cause of all problems and disappointments is that we see things the way we want to see it. We all do this mistake conciously or unconciously.  However whenever we interact, we can try to remind ourself – "Step in his (the other person's) shoes".

Happy changing shoes!

I feel this is a usability flaw in Gmail's "Mark as read" contextual menu item.

For all the contextual actions, once the action is done, the checkbox status is turned back to default – i.e. not-checked.

However when you "Mark as read", the mails remain marked i.e. checked, even after the action has taken place. This means the user has to manually un-check all the mails before he takes another action. Thus he is always at a risk of taking wrong action on the un-intentionally checked mails.

I think, once the "Mark as read" or "Mark as unread" is done, the checkbox status of the mails should be turned back to the default. This will provide users a predictable and expected system which is consistent with other options of simmilar nature.

Abhishek

A signage as critical as this has been done more in "style" than keeping quick – common understanding in mind.

This is a signage at the main gate of the hospital. It is trying to show two arrows – one towards, the Emergency / Blood Bank / Service Block and the another one pointing towards Main Lobby / OPD / Admissions.

Now, if you have a closer look, or have a common man take a at-a-glance look (the best a person will do if he is rushing in someone for an emergency), you will find that this signage can create a lot of confusion –

1. The department names are not segregated and one might read it like "Emergency Blood Bank" instead of "Emergency" & "Blood Bank"

2. The most important pointer is merged with the common and not-so-urgent ones, which dilutes the purpose. The most important ones are "OPD" and "Emergency", which should get maximum exposure.

3. The shape of the signage is improper and confusing. It should have been cut out in form of two seperage and big arrows, clearly marked in seperate colors, and pointed exactly in the direction of the department. (The OPD is currently pointing towards the parking lot – I can say this because I have been there several times).

4. For visitors, it is not important to know the location of the "Service Block" and hence it is consuming valuable real-estate

5. The board should be illuminated for cleared viewing during night

I hope to see these changes soon

Abhishek

Recently, I saw a funny metaphor for "Gift-Voucher" when I visited Shoppers Stop in City Center.

It is a poor example of using a graphics / icon to symbolize a concept. The graphic of a "hanger" gives no reason to relate it to a "gift" or a "redeemable voucher" or both. At least it is not evident to a normal human being. I think something traditional (like a gift box or picture of vouchers) with a touch of modern graphics would have done much better.

I doubt this signage is getting them any mileage.

Abhishek

Eoghan McCabe has covered some good conversion tips in his blog post – User Interface Simplicity Gone Wrong.

He has explained how website conversion rate can shoot up if the contact forms are simple and to-the-point. Everyone is in a hurry and people hate filling in long forms. Web site visitors are impatient and one should not expect them to fill in long forms. They get frustrated very easily and messages like "Zip code has been left blank. Kindly provide the same and re-submit the form" can simply put them off! They are doing a favor to you by getting in touch with you and not the other way round. I have been a strong advocate of a simple form, so that the initial contact can be made without much effort in few seconds.

I have been using the simple contact form for few years now and I have experienced the jump in conversion since then

However, I would additionally suggest that -

1. Include couple of contact fields as well like Name, Email, Project Details (Phone number is optional as many people may not like to disclose their phone number to an unknown person)

2. Include a link to the privacy policy or at least make the visitor feel safe enough that his information will not be sold out!

3. Put this contact form in every page of the website

4. When a contact form has been filled and submitted, a feedback must be generated in form of a "Thank you message". This make the user confident that his action has yielded a positive result.

5. DO NOT put a "Reset" button below the form. I have seen countless websites where they have a stupid "Reset" button which gets pressed by a person-in-a-hurry and results in wiping out the entire effort of filling up the form.

6. Set a "tab" preference in the correct order, so that when a user presses "tab" after filling in one field, he is taken to the next field. the sequence must be correct and end with the "Submit" button.

It do a lot of good to your website and conversion!

Abhishek

Hi Folks,

Google is doing everything in their capacity to weed out spam and return meaningful results for search queries. However it seems that they missed on an important aspect!

Concept

A good quality website will definitely have proper (if not accurate) spelling and grammar. Using advanced spelling and grammer checking routines, it is very much possible to weed out spam and provide higher rank to high quality websites.

Benefits

This approach has many advantages:

1. Quality will get preference over quantity

2. Sites which are ranked lower due to poor quality spelling and grammar have a chance of imporving ranks by correcting spelling and gramatical errors. This will initiate a rush to improve user experience and we will be able to see better quality sites all over.

3. Sites which use more "generic terms" and less "proper nouns" will get higher rank as they are simple to understand and are written with a generic audience in mind.

4. Spam sites which simply puts in pages generated from search results will get totally eliminated as they will have broken sentences.

5. Links farms, FFA, Generic directories can be identified and ignored unless specifically requested by the user.

Implementation

The implementation can be further enhanced by setting up a baseline and quality benchmarks, just the way Google did for link popularity (Page Rank).

Sites can be evaluated on a regular basis based on the following parameters:

• Total number of words in the page
• Spelling errors per 100 words of content in the page
• Gramatical errors per 100 words of content in the page
• Another parameter which can be useful is how the page validates. Is the page full of HTML errors? Is it XHTML validated? Is the CSS validated?
• How often the page have been updated?
• How often the site has been down?

This data can be collected over a period of time and can be be used to determine how the site has improved or declined in quality.

Can it be implemented?

Now the question is – "How difficult is the implementation?"

I have recently been watching some of the changes introduced by Google in order to refine their ranking algorithm:

a) Penalty being imposed for duplicate content
b) Reciprocal links getting lesser weightage than one-way links
c) Usage of Latent semantic analysis (LSA) to find relevant related results

If we consider the total processing power required for each of these refinements, we can safely assume that they have enough processing power to implement spelling and grammar check.

I will not be surprised if Google is already working on this. Therefore it is advised that try to improve the above mentioned parameters before the magical google update strikes you!
I hope to see "quality based ranking" in action soon.
Abhishek