Today, Abhinav Bindra won the 10m air rifle gold and became the first ever individual from India to win a gold medal at Olympics.

I think this is the most joyful event in the history of Indian sports. More so because, it was a painful thought that a country with more than 1 billion people does not have one athlete / sportsman who can win a gold for India at Olympics. But today it has changed.

And, I wish, it has changed forever. And I am sure the pride and recognition that will be showered upon Abhinav will change the face of Indian sports forever. Also, the fact that Abhinav had to arrange for all the infrastructure himself, should be a lesson for the sports authority who provide sub-standard infrastructure to our athletes and expect them to fire at Olympics.

BTW, I am really at my wits end - if a guy can arrange this sort of private facilities (However rich his dad may be - I am sure he is not richer than Indian Government), why this facility cannot be arranged for all Indian athletes.

I have recently signed up with this wonderful social media website Sphinn.com which aggregates news and articles on search engine marketing and social media landscape. The site has got excellent content and an active community.

However, while signing up, I got confused (for a while though) on the signup page.

The point of confusion is the disabled "Create user" button at the bottom.

The concept is that the user need to verify the availability of username (compulsory) and validity of email before the "Create user" buttom becomes active. The problem with this approach is that:

• By doing this, the webmaster has put the onus of verifying the username and validity of email on the user and is stopping him from moving ahead in the signup process.
• Above all, it is not in line with the general user experience in most signup forms, thereby resulting in a learning curve for its users.
• People may not like to learn a "new way of doing thing" for something as simple and one-time activity as signup with a service.

The user initiated verification can be an additional benefit and can be provided as a feature to improve user experience, but not at the cost of disabling the "Create user" button and verifying it at the site of form submission.

It seems sphinn.com is based on a popular script called pligg.com. If the signup form comes from that popular open-source social media script, this usability flaw needs to be fixed in more than one website

Abhishek

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?

Department of Information Technology, Government of West Bengal (www.itwb.org) is doing a remarkable work in supporting and nurturing IT industry in the state of West Bengal. Their investor-friendly approach and innovative action-oriented leadership has changed West Bengal over last five years. I am fortunate to be doing business in this state in such exciting times!

They have put up their vision as:

• To Rank among top-3 IT States of India by 2010
• Contribute 15% - 20% of the country’s total IT revenues
• Create leadership position in executing high value-added IT work - developed through intellectual leadership and supported by Government initiatives

Their solid track record might just enable them to pull up and meet these targets. However, I seriously doubt that this position can be achieved and / or sustainable in long term. There are two core issues, which if not checked immediately will result in serious decline in the position that has been created with the initial efforts.

1. The poor quality of education
2. Indifferent attitude towards homegrown small and medium sized IT companies

Poor quality of education

Knowledge industry needs top quality human resource that are well educated, thoroughly knowledgeable and well groomed. Unfortunately our education system is inadequate and we are not creating employable talent.

• IT education has become a low paid job and is mostly taken up by individuals who are unable to make it to the professional ranks in IT companies.
• The education system is still based on text-books and spoon-fed course materials. Reading outside the prescribed text-books is hardly encouraged and/or practiced. This has resulted in a huge pool of IT resource pool with no individuality and poor problem solving capabilities.
• Quality education has become privilege of an elite few who go to the top ranking institutions and comprise less than 1% of the total resource pool. It is unfortunate that most of these individuals decide to join companies outside India for better pay-packages draining away one-million-per-student from taxpayers money!
• IT education has been limited to "programming"! I have spoken to thousands of It graduates and they have no idea that there are career opportunities in fields like testing, publishing, project management, etc.
• Current education system revolves around imparting IQ and not EQ, which is most important for success
• The current education system is biased towards commercially successful companies and their technologies like Microsoft and Sun. Low cost and easy-to-implement open source frameworks are ignored and are positioned as "alien" technologies which "does not have any career opportunities" to the students.
• The general attitude, that has been built up among youngsters who are going for a job is to find a safe-secure job in a reputed stable company. They are not encouraged to take risk and help grow new leaders for the economy. It is very important to have a general "rough it out" attitude to make a place a hot destination for growing great companies. This is the reason some locations are very successful in creating great companies, while others lack far behind.

Indifferent attitude towards homegrown small and medium sized IT companies

I have personally felt that the state government has an indifferent attitude towards homegrown small and medium sized IT companies. It seems that their action plan clearly talks about getting external investment from successful IT companies worldwide. In short term this looks like a very good solution as it will get major investment in a short period of time and they will find their graph moving towards their projected figures. However in long term, it is very difficult to achieve sustainable and long term growth without tapping into the local entrepreneurial capabilities.

If you see the IT industry in Kolkata, you will hardly find a homegrown IT company who features among the top software exporters from West Bengal. In fact most of the home grown companies collectively do not employ even 25% IT workforce of Kolkata. We do not have any national hero or brand, which has made a mark on the national / global platform. When we go to global expositions like IndiaSoft and CeBIT, you do not see any company from West Bengal competing against the national players in the global marketplace.

Some basic reasons I can see are:

• There is no affordable workspace for small and medium sized IT companies except SDF Building and a couple other locations built and operated by government or a government agency like Webel. There is major discrepancy in allocation of office space and land to small and medium sized businesses.
• The law and order system is not up to the mark and in tune with possible cyber crimes. 90% of the police stations do not have any idea about cyber crime. If they land up investigating one, they will try to get rid of the same by harassing you to an extent that you will give up. Most of the police workforce is either not trained about white collar crime or they pretend not to know the subject. It is a known fact that crime rate is highest in small and medium sized enterprises, and most of them go unnoticed.
• We get to deal with government official everyday, who does not know their own work. They come from different departments and confuse you to such an extent that you see no other option, but to bribe them and satisfy them!
• Government is more interested in job creation than value creation. They are less interested in the quality and sustainability of jobs that are being created. Also, there is lesser emphasis on profitability of companies that exist. The economic eco-system works on value creation, which leads of job creation. This is not the other way around.  
• Small and medium sized IT companies are not communicated the benefits they are entitled to! This results in a scenario that all the benefits are enjoyed by a select few.
• The benefit claim process is very cumbersome and an IT business which needs a level of agility to perform optimally will not be able to claim the benefits they are entitled to, unless they put in considerable amount of effort behind the same or forge the paperwork!

Again, I personally believe that it is not the responsibility of educational institutions and government to push a business. However, for economic growth of a state which has been lying at the bottom of the economic chart for last thirty years, there needs to be initiative to creative a conductive environment.

Without most of these issues addressed, I do not see any long term sustainable growth of IT industry in West Bengal.

I wish I am wrong.

Abhishek

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.

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