I saw on http://www.notioninkfan.com/ a link to a survey. Adam developers want feedback from Adam users and they created that survey.

I immediately thought ‘Why isn’t this featured on Notionink’s official website?’ People at NotionInk Hacks forums too expressed similar sentiments.

So I told myself “Come on! Don’t be a prick. Take the survey, help them make Adam better.” And I clicked on the survey link. I was glad that the NotionInk team was doing this: collecting user feedback. But my happiness lasted only until the survey questions appeared on my screen.

Either NI doesn’t care about this survey or there has been some colossal misunderstanding on what amounts to an effective survey.

Now for some gems (these are actual questions) from the survey:

1. Prioritize your activities using a PC/Laptop (Range: very likely – very unlikely/choices: Content creation, sharing, consumption (?!!!) )
2. What are the primary destination of the content you create (similar to the above question with choices like blog, social network etc)
3. Can you remember the recent book & magazine you have read? (Dear NI, are you testing my integrity here? This is a WTF question)

And I clicked ‘close’ and wrote this blog post. Here’s a message to NI:

Dear NI, I know that spelling/grammar mistakes are no big deal. But when a company makes them on a user survey, it shows how much you care. And, it takes a few minutes on Google to find out how to design effective surveys. The net effect of your survey is that, I conclude that you don’t give a damn about me, the customer. So instead of complaining and cribbing all the time, I make an open offer: I will give you 10 hours of free consultancy on UX research methods and usability testing. Yes, free. I know you guys are a start-up and you may not have the resources to delve into detail of UX design. Let me know. sumank/gmail

Very rarely a product comes along, gathering tremendous support and anticipation even before it’s launched. A huge fan base is built even before anyone has seen the product. Product companies fail to get that sort of PR even after spending millions. Adam was one such product. It was touted as the Apple killer. The underdog that’ll for sure, kick butt.

I got my Adam yesterday after more than a 40 day delay. 40 days more than the promised ‘six to eight weeks’ delivery assurance. Adam probably is a brilliant product no doubt, but customer experience is much, much more than just a great UI or prodigious engineering. Here’s why:

1. Taking the ‘personal’ ‘we are a small outfit’ charm too far: I understand that Notionink is a start-up but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to jump in and collect pre-orders, without even as much as a decent website for the product! So many pages are ‘under construction’. Their initial demo videos were so amateur, I was wondering if I bet on the wrong horse. Jazzy imagery can never replace solid information dear NI. I hope it’s not too late to rectify that. Your fans have set up better websites than you have.
2. The CEO also doubles up as the PR person and posts – at times adoloscent- pleas, product announcements, and updates! That, on a blog hosted on wordpress.com. Are you telling me setting up a blog on your own domain is tough work?
3. Not communicating with customers: After I placed the order, I got an order confirmation mail from NI. But it didn’t mention anything about additional ‘Customs Clearance’ fees. I get to know about it two days before the delivery through the shipping company, GATI. I understand that customs fee is something I will have to pay, but why wasn’t I told about it? Why didn’t NI tell me about it through a mail? Some people told me that it was posted on their blog. Heh! I have a job and I can’t be following NI’s blog. Not after I have paid some 23k INR. I expect them to be professional about it. And, their address, as it appears on their site, indicates their office is in Bangalore. Either NI doesn’t care about the Indian market or they are as naive and silly as I am: why should I pay additional customs fee to buy something from an Indian company? I know it sounds silly but that’s the first thought that crossed my mind.
4. Not offering standard communication channels: No phone numbers that I can use to contact NI are listed on their website. What now, you are a start up so you can’t afford to hire a few people to man the phone lines? Then act small! Don’t make expansive statements like ‘change the world’. The only way to contact them is through e-mail.
5. Focus on jazzing up the product instead of focusing on user’s efficiency and productivity: Simple tasks like firing up the keypad is made cumbersome because of the apparent lack of attention to detail. I conclude this after asking my colleagues (who are used to touch interfaces and who use the Internet for more than 5 hours a day) to perform simple tasks like ‘enter a URL’ ‘Delete configured mail account’.
6. Unless Adam is meant for the geek, it is astounding that the interface ignores basic UX tenets like learnability, efficiency, system status… I could go on.
7. It is obvious that Adam was never tested for usability with actual end users. I doubt if they even know who their end user is. Apple’s iPhone and iPad target the lay user and their design is centered around that user’s context. Which is why iPod, iPhone are cult products. If NI wants more people to buy Adam, they need to sell it lay users. And if they want to do that, they will have to do a lot of work on the product to make it user friendly.
8. Lack of product documentation: Adam’s manual says little or nothing about how to use important features like 3G. How many users know what an APN is? And worse still how many will know how to configure it?

These are observations from using Adam for barely more than a few hours. I got it last evening and my disenchantment and disillusionment grew starker the more I used the product. I bought Adam because I thought that we should encourage products like these: products that are a result of a young man’s dream to change the world. To show the Goliaths that great products needn’t necessarily come from big corporate houses. That, Adam is from India. If Notionink continues to ignore end users, their aspirations, and their problems, forget Apple, they can’t beat the neighborhood grocer. Notionink needs to understand that it takes years to build a brand. And you need only minutes to ruin it. The rate at which they are getting bad press, I wouldn’t be surprised if their sales demand drops, when they graduate to real retailing.

Rohan, the CEO, of NI should probably leave PR to professionals. And stop posting stuff like ‘the customs department wanted bribes’. It serves no purpose and it makes him sound like a whiner who’s looking for excuses and will exacerbate NI’s PR predicament.

I wrote this in a fit of mixed emotion: rage, disappointment, and disillusionment. I wanted to gift Adam to my wife. But alas, if I find it difficult to use – I am a UX pro – I really doubt that she would like Adam. Unless of course, I am a complete noob and got it all wrong.

If you think I have read something wrong or if I wrote something factually inaccurate, do leave a comment. But I don’t think I let my emotion get the better of me. Which is what Notionink should be doing.

Dear Indian software company, I didn’t want to write this, but you forced me to this. I am stunned at that apathy and lack of imagination in the way you try to hire talent.
When you want a guy to come for an interview, the least you could do is, giving him parking space. That’s fine, I can live without parking space. But you claim you are ‘going green’ and yet, you insist on ‘a printed copy of your resume’ ‘printed copy of this e-mail’… My small brain can’t fathom how that is exactly ‘going green’ Did you realize this is 2010?

Now that’s just getting to your gate. The experience is, subtly put, fucking irritating. If I somehow managed to enter your hallowed precinct, your staffing team, sure as hell, ups the ante. “Be seated. I’ll call the_staffing_team_jerk_off” The front office zombie tells me. And the wait is eternal. As I watched those clocks that showed time from all timezones, I thought “Thank god, at least, they have a sense of humor!” Why should any self-respecting, experience pro wait? Just to meet you? You think you are doing him a favor?

Fine, I grudgingly move on and the interview is finally happening. A single word describes the actual interview: insufferable. What does “How would you qualitatively collect requirements from customers” mean? And what does “Describe yourself” mean? What do you want me to say? I was half expecting “What are you wearing” as the next question. Some genius even asked me ‘Tell me about your parents.’ Nut case!

Why is it tough for you to get this: an interview, especially in our context, is not a test. It’s the place where you and I find out if we could have a business arrangement. Capisce? Now if you are in agreement, don’t you think you should make the whole experience painless? And when you want people to drive to your mega office complex, 30 miles away, offer to pay for gas. Goddamn! Customer experience. Customer delight. Customer focus. These are the buzz words you use. A prospective employee is also your customer. Forget delight, at least ensure there is no pain.

Fitts’s law states that acquiring a target is a function of the size of the target and the distance between the pointer and the target. In other words, bigger, closer the better. If you have anything to do with user-experience design you would have come across this ‘law’. What most practioners of UX design probably don’t know is this: why are bigger, closer targets easy to acquire?
The probable answer lies elsewhere, in neurology. A few years back I stumbled upon Dr. V.S. Ramachandran’s BBC Reith lecture. It was a defining moment for me: it suddenly dawned on me that design is not so much about focus groups, surveys, and collected opinion. Design is about your brain.

Dr. Ramachandran explains how human vision is a complex process that involves thirty visual centers in your brain. What you see is not actually what you get. What you see is what you want. Case in point is this famous puzzle. Go ahead, give it a look.

Okay, what this must tell you is that vision is not as straightforward as you probably think it was. There’s a great deal of latent bias involved in rendering a simple scene. Why is it this way? Dr. Ramachandran says that human vision evolved to defeat camouflage and discover objects:

“But imagine your primate ancestors scurrying up in the treetops trying to detect a lion seen behind fluttering green foliage. What you get inside the eyeball on the retina is just a bunch of yellow lion fragments obscured by all the leaves. But the brain says – so to speak – “What’s the likelihood that all these different yellow fragments are exactly the same yellow simply by chance? Zero. They must all belong to one object, so let me link them together, glue them together. Oh my God, it’s a lion – let me out of here!” And as soon as you glue them together, a signal gets sent to the limbic system saying: “AHA, there’s something object-like, pay attention here”.

So there’s an arousal, and an attention which then titillates the limbic system, and you pay attention and you dodge the lion.”

So, this primordial bias is still with us. Your brain’s primary function is survival. Your survival. Your brain hates to process any piece of information that is not directly contributing to performing its primary duties. In Dr. Ramachandran’s words, your brain strives to minimize computational labor.

There you have it. The reason why buttons or links that are too small don’t get too many clicks: it involves precision-pointing and clicking. That’s unwanted labor. And that is why bigger and closer objects are ‘easier’ to acquire.

There’s another angle to it. An important angle. Users “like” clicking bigger buttons. They may not realize it but they do like it. That’s because your brain ‘rewards’ you when you fall in-line with it and not hamper the way it works. Your brain sends a signal, a reward, to your emotional center because you chose to click the bigger button. Dr. Ramachandran says:

“The Dalmatian dog example is very important because it reminds us that vision is an extraordinarily complex and sophisticated process. And even looking at a simple scene involves a complex hierarchy, a stage by stage processing. At each stage in the hierarchy of processing, when a partial solution is achieved – “Hey it looks a bit dog-like right here” – there is a reward signal “AHA”, a partial “AHA”, and a small bias is sent back to earlier stages to facilitate the further binding of the features of the dog. And through such progressive bootstrapping the final dog clicks in place to create the final big “AHA!” ”

Conversely (probably) your brain sends a ‘distress’ signal when you encounter poorly designed buttons or navigational aids in a software product or website.

To conclude, efficiency, aesthetics, and desirability are deeply inter-linked. So if you want to make your customers go “Aha!” don’t burden them with small buttons or links. Bigger, closer, the better.

After much procrastination, here it is. The Yakpad 2.0 (beta). Runs on WordPress. Also, I’ve merged all my blogs into this one (tech writing blog, usability blog). This is a work in progress children.

IRCTC.co.in is the Indian Railways’ ticketing website.

April has only 30 days. I still went ahead and selected 31st April and hit ‘Find Trains’. Guess what happened next?

If you know April has only 30 days why would you add 31st to it? Better than designing accurate error messages, is preventing errors. IRCTC seemed to have missed that part.

Recommended Books on Usability

write to me: sumank [at] gmail [dot] com

Travelocity.com

My rating: 2 out of 5

See that screen grab above? Yeah. That’s what you’re supposed to use to pick a ‘From’ and ‘To’. See how the ‘One-way’ and ‘Return’ checking is done. Instead of asking you upfront, they ask you at the end! This is lazy design.

Makemytrip.com

My rating: 2.5 out of 5

Easy to search for flights. But text is difficult to read because the text and BG are not contrasting. But if you are a South Indian and you have an initial for a last name OR if you have two words in your first name (like Suman Kumar), you can’t use this site. See screen grabs.

See? They want my last name to be at least two characters long!

And, they won’t let me write my first as I always have written in. They want it to be SUMANKUMAR. And not SUMAN KUMAR. Hey! It is my name!

Cleartrip.com

My rating: 3 out of 5

Simple and elegant (as compared to the others I mean). No pull-down menus. Just simple text boxes to pick your ‘From’ and ‘To’. The use of Web 2.0 technology… I like them! But, for the position and color of that ‘Search flights’ button. It should have been ‘inside’ instead of jumping out… and white text of reddish-orange? And, most irritating is gray text on gray BG in the search results. Guys! come on!

Oh well. That means a good chunk of Indians can’t use 30 Boxes. Big deal!

Recommended Books on Usability

write to me: sumank [at] gmail [dot] com

This demo — from Pattie Maes’ lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry — was the buzz of TED. It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine “Minority Report” and then some.

Recommended Books on Usability

write to me: sumank [at] gmail [dot] com

Made of foam and force sensors, Impress works with both touch and the intensity of pressure. This computing technology lets the user squeeze out information or put objects in motion by deforming the surface of the computer.

Read more @ Read Write Web

Recommended Books on Usability

write to me: sumank [at] gmail [dot] com