2011
Mobile Apps Usability Review (iPhone / Android)
I am not an usability guru or an expert in usability arena. But I would like to share my thoughts when I had an application which my team developed for review with few iPhone users. Surprisingly, I could see lot of things on how people react to the usability of the application. The group ranged from sparse users to best users of iPhone.
I had to admit that I was unable to digest all the feedback given by the users. But still I feel all the points given by the users has got a huge value. I would like to quote some examples from the review. The application had barcode scanning, the user took the iPhone device and started to place the camera of the iphone to very close to the barcode. However, after sometime the user managed to scan a barcode. I felt the necessity of placing a help mechanism to get the users right at the first time. Again that is subjective to the users whether they opt of reading through the help.
Another issue on usability was throwing a registration screen in front of the user. We had a registration screen and users did not know how to navigate through it. If we wish maximum number of people to use our application we should cater to the weakest or dumbest request of the user.
Learning is fun. I understood that the touch screen users try to use their click click mind on a touch and expect it to work as they do in desktop. This needs to be kept in mind of the designers / developers of mobile application. Hope this might add 2 cents to someone who needs something about usability on mobile phones.
2009
I bricked my HTC Touch Phone
I was trying to fiddle with my HTC Touch phone accidently I bricked the phone and it was completely dead. I did try to revive it by doing all kinds of resets advised on HTC Forums. I was much disappointed that I bricked my phone.
I gave it for service to one of the renowned service shops at Chennai. Surprise awaited and I heard that nothing can be done with the phone. I made up my mind and then purchased a korean phone. However the features in the Korean phone was awesome but I loved my old HTC Touch phone.
After getting the bricked phone from service centre, I started to find the appropriate ROM for radio and other flash ROM for the phone. I wanted to give a final shot and try it. I managed after struggling for 45 minutes to flash the right ROM for the phone. It choked but finally it got its life back.
I patted myself for the awesome work I have done. Now I am using the same bricked phone which came back to life. I felt good after fixing it. The lesson learnt from this incident was that I learnt something that before flashing the phone one should take complete backup of the phone.
2008
Wow!
I finally gave up for some time on getting my blogs programmed and so I was forced to use Blogspot to power my blogs. Here is my updated and new blog. I still have the plans of creating my own blog software which will have all the features of top notch blog machines. My plan might look skeptical, but hope that would be soon accomplished.
Tis idea of having the blog pointing to my subdomain arose when I started to sit over a cup of tea and took a shot of my colleague on local tea shop and upload them through my Sony Ericsson K850i. It gracefully got uploaded to a new destination @ blogspot.