Demystifying Fitts’s law

1 year ago Posted by Suman Kumar Filed under usability, user experience, ux

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. Continue reading “Demystifying Fitts’s law” »

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Kabini: Wilder Waters – 1

2 years ago Posted by Suman Kumar Filed under stories

The tusker charged at our jeep. Initially I thought ‘mock charge, ha ha’ and started clicking away on my Nikon D90. And then it struck to me that only the ‘aunties’, female elephants that take care of the babies, mock. This tusker meant what he was trying to do: smash us to pieces. Our driver, an experienced, expert hand, from the Jungle Lodges Kabini team reversed and was all set to turn around and scoot when the tusker abruptly gave up his charge. So our driver chose to hang around. A red wattled lap wing shrieked and flew over us. My heart was banging against my chest. Axel, a German photographer, whispered, ‘can we go closer? After some time?’  I was stunned. I wanted to scream ‘Dude do you realize we could all have been killed?’ And I turned More...

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Stories from Chennai

2 years ago Posted by Suman Kumar Filed under stories

I always saw Chennai in Yellow. It could be the harsh sun. Or probably the bright colored Sambar with a wild, turmeric fragrance. The Chennai in early 80s was a different world. There were no high-rise apartment complexes. Barring the LIC building on Mount road, which was the tallest in Chennai, there were no distinguished tall structures. We lived in a small lane off Seethammal road in Alwarpet. A few hundred families existed there: crammed into a lane whose tail end was abruptly blocked by a concrete wall, which separated an old bungalow and our miserable lane. An ancient Mango tree lived in that bungalow and its monstrous branches spread across the wall and into our lane. There was no traffic in the lane thanks to the wall that blocked the rear end. We played cricket in the lane; More...

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The End of the Revolution

2 years ago Posted by Suman Kumar Filed under childhood, chittoor, politics, stories

A look at the news should tell you how the so called Maoists have embarked on a highway to self-destruction. No, I don’t know enough about their philosophy or why they took up arms struggle. Not because I don’t care. Because it doesn’t make sense. It probably did until the economic reforms started in the early 90s I don’t know. Probably. But now, it doesn’t make sense to blow up rail tracks and kill cops. And civilians.When I was a school kid in Chittoor, in the early 80s, I was mesmerized by the ‘Annalu’ (as they were referred to in A.P.) I used stop by our school walls and read the Radicals Students Union graffiti. “Viplavam vardhillali” (long live the revolution) was ubiquitous. So was “Dunney vaadidhey bhoomi” (he who plows the land, owns it.)

We never saw More...

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Yak Pad 2.0

2 years ago Posted by Suman Kumar Filed under blogs, general, usability, user experience, ux

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.

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Spanish biriyani

2 years ago Posted by Suman Kumar Filed under general, Uncategorized

Ha!

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Make your own jokes!

2 years ago Posted by Suman Kumar Filed under general, Uncategorized

I read it as 'Gloria's jeans now open.'

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Jet Airways sends me someone’s ticket

2 years ago Posted by Suman Kumar Filed under general

I have no idea why I got this mail from Jet Airways. I looked at the ticket and under ‘E-mail’ it was someone else. It was not even Gmail. You know the story of the ‘dot’ in Gmail. So either the customer that booked the ticket gave a secondary mail id and made a mistake. Or, Jet screwed up. I am inclined to believe the latter to be true. Here’s a screen grab. I have blurred all private information. WTF is going on? Someone tell me please!

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Pug on a bike

2 years ago Posted by Suman Kumar Filed under general, Uncategorized

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Kids playing in water

2 years ago Posted by Suman Kumar Filed under general, Uncategorized

The park next to my apartment. That sprinkler was awesome. even i played for a while.

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