Nordstrom Innovation Lab created a sunglasses try-out app for shoppers at their flagship store in Seattle, WA. This was done with user experience designers and developers in situ at the store. They tested and tweaked with live user feedback over a week building the ‘just right’ app. We would love to be a part of such process in India. Anyone game?

This is an amazing animated infographic that caught me. I am sharing this here as it is relevant to Apparatus as a business and me as a netizen. Click on the image below to launch inforgraphic.

Created by: Online Schools

While we are revisiting the great big world of building online stores in India the west has moved on. User experiences are getting closer to visual tactility and aiding users to examine there wares better. Look at this video below. I am going to try this very soon and post another video.

I reluctantly registered for a two day conference in support of Akshaya Patra and Anant called Social India. There were significant talks by experts in social media marketing from India and North America. For me, as an entrepreneur and a user experience designer, there were lessons to learn. What did I know?

Social media is a strong influential channel that can be leveraged by brands and businesses to work in tandem with traditional media. Enterprises should include them in the larger communication or marketing strategy to strengthen it. In India businesses have woken up to this fact recently and are working with digital agencies to create a strategy.

Most of these social media agencies have evolved from traditional web marketing or customer relationship management. So there is very little or no creative leadership to put together contextually correct, multi channel, strong campaigns that impact. I personally do not believe that silos of facebook contests make for a social media campaign and most of the solutions were that. The quality of destination content could be better with decoupages that involve photographs, videos and critical user contributions. Most brand case studies were counting heads as metrics.

The North American agencies were more evolved. I was impressed with the case study for Knorr Sidekicks presented by Eric Weaver of Ant’s Eye View. Salty is a salt shaker character who tugged at the heart strings of women who put dinner on the family table and he had them ‘following’ him. Take a look at this television commercial introducing Salty.

There were similar insights and case studies of Shashank Nigam from Simpliflying, an agency that focusses on social consumer connect for airline businesses, on Spicejet introducing Bombardier viral video. I should also mention Jim Long, a photojournalist at NBC and his insights into a new publishing paradigm. His talk was over Skype from New York. Fabulous!

The spirit and energy of independent publishers, bloggers and other participants engaged me. Particularly Prasant and his Lighthouse Insights. I cannot forget Kiruba, a TEDx representative in India. He is from Pondicherry and works out of Chennai. Kiruba is an energetic compère with a penchant for interacting with people. Good to connect.

Unlike a design conference, there was humility, participation, camaraderie and free exchange of ideas. I am ditching those black tee chic design junkets and sticking to honest ones like this. The closure with Sean Moffitt of Wikibrand fame was apt. This was a valuable weekend of new connections, lessons and possibilities.

Apparatus is now armed to create informed extensions of user experience design that weaves itself well with the social media world. We will create cohesive products and communication that engages to acquire new users or retain them.

Apparatus team have been working on a few online store projects. Most of these are at a prelaunch stage and that makes it easy for user experience design teams to partake in product definition and extend further into product design.

However there are a few who have been in business and need a substantial design overhaul. These ecommerce properties ail from a few maladies that needs attention.

Discovery that matches user intent leads to conversion
Users who approach online stores come with a definite intent to find a suitable product. The user experience should be designed for users with specific needs and users who want to explore and discover. The design should set a strong context for them to arrive at a product or move about and find.

Fixes versus refurbishment
These stores are ongoing businesses backed by investor firms. They cannot suspend operations for an overhaul. We understand this. But the management typically sees the solution as a series of small fixes that will lead to betterment. It will not. The synthesis of web analytics and user research should lead to larger incremental phases of change that can better the brand experience in a short period of time. Bite the bullet!

Knowing the domain does not make you a UX expert
It is a great additive that can be learned. Good design is about creating cohesive, compelling and usable experiences through framework, structure and content. It involves information design, graphic design and meticulous production. You need help. Hire us!

Curated content emotes and converts
Do the thing that offline stores do as ‘we suggest’. Do collections that are thematic and write about them. Do collections that go well together and publish them as trends or what people like. Help users choose if they are exploring through supportive house-styled images of products and well written textual content. Add on contextual user generated content and create digestible nuggets of content to consume. And lead all these to appropriate stock keep units.

To know more about these write to me. If you want to get this done call Apparatus. Have a good day!

I love visual.ly and the below infographic on security issues on Google versus Facebook is as informative as well-designed. Visit the site – a treasure trove of infographic gems.

by NowSourcing via

Category: Graphic Design, Information graphics, social media

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In early eighties small town India, like my hometown, had not seen computers. The closest that you came to one was when you booked a railway ticket and it was across the glass in the booth. It was most often operated by bored mid-size government workers in synthetic bush shirts, buttoned down till the vest and a handkerchief dipped in talc around their neck. Or by women nibbling fried snacks from their cold press molded stainless steel ‘eversilver’ tiffin boxes next to perennially plastic covered keyboards.

I have to describe these machines to you. They were behemoth grey boxes with a pixel screen, slightly larger than a Tamil pocket crime novel encased in an oversized dull monitor. The CPU looked like a part of a menacing Russian tank and the monitor was made of discarded plastic buckets. The keyboard had their tab keys jammed often and the lady operator was screaming for help in a fit, kicking her snacks of her table while the cursor did a wild tra-la-la jig across form fields on that minuscule window. And I was waiting with my filled form. Always.

I never understood how they can make us more productive.

A little later when my father bought an AppleIIc for a publisher friend of his from Singapore (the farthest idea of a foreign land for a Tamil boy) I was amazed that computers can look good. My dad had meticulously unpacked and assembled it with great care. The machine, if I can call it, looked like million suns of gypsies’ ice a la Marquez.

Call it love at first sight. Apple it was – hook, line and sinker. I was a convert, a self-confessed fanboy and hopelessly smitten for life.

At college they taught me BASIC on an Apple. I met a Macintosh at a design school. Not that we were allowed to use it freely. We used to set type in Aldus Pagemaker, take prints and paste it on our artworks with rubber cement. That was quite a promotion from hot metal where we have to set type laterally inverted or phototypesetting where we pretended to solve a thermodynamics problem on a blue screen and got a small piece of photo paper with type exposed on it. We loved and grew on Macs.

Then came the candy colored eMac at home, a Powerbook G4, an early iPod, more Macbooks, an iPhone and a strong affinity for a brand that thought of people who used their product more than the machine itself. An affinity to the creator of this brand – Steve Jobs.

More on Mac and me soon.

I have been a big fan of blues. BB King is a doyen who stayed loyal to Mississippi delta blues and worked with some of the biggest names in the industry. I thought there was a movie plot in here. Take a look.

Scratch any designer worth his (her) professional salt, and you will find the chief deity of his profession, the User. This User – the ubiquitous and the all pervasive phenomenon who is ‘virajman’ in the sanctum sanctorum of the temple of design – demands, drives and possesses the design practitioner and his priestcraft.

The User also defines the sacred liturgy of the design profession – user, user profile, usage, use cases, usability, usefulness, user-centricity, user advocacy, user context, user relevance…

Just pick the last one, Relevance. It’s something of a sacred notion – after all, you want every schema and artifact you analyze and produce as a designer to be Relevant to the User. And of course Relevance is not a thing, it’s relationship term, a kind of a kinship term, it’s not a thing that exists by itself.  Is the downgrading of the US debt rating to AA+ less or more relevant than Kate Middleton’s rumored anorexia? Throw a User (consumer of information) into the mix and only then can you talk about Relevance.

But does this principle of Relevance have no down side to it? Alas, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Eli Pariser’s book ‘Filter Bubble – What The Internet Is Hiding From You’ explores the search and personalization algorithms used by the Internet Big Boys (Yahoos!, Googles, and Facebooks of the world) that filter information and give you what is Relevant to You (based on your personal history and past searches). This, argues Pariser, creates the phenomenon of a closed bubble arising out of the relevance paradox where the more you find some things relevant, the more you are served similar things – effectively cutting you off from alternate perspectives, ideas, opinions, practices or world views. If effect, by serving you with dishes drawn from the menu you like over and over, you are prevented from experiencing new cuisines and tastes that might (potentially) enlarge your palette and make you a better connoisseur.

Is there an alternative? Would you always want to be served with what you know you like, or would you, once in a while, want the waiter to suggest you ‘something different’?

Some of these Internet Big Boys have a system where the personalization algorithms can be overridden by humans (waiters!) who decide a link to a story is important enough to be served to you even if the algorithm thinks that it ‘ranks low in relevance going by user’s history’. But, of course, in this case, it is a human deciding what choices to give you. Either way, your curry is rated, ranked, curated and served hot!

The larger question is, is this such a unique phenomenon wrought by exploding information technologies OR is this a more normal and natural paradox, a part of what we are and how we function in the world? The fact is, most things we see, do or experience – are done by choice. (I am not talking about acts of nature and coincidence here). You read a book, you watch a movie, you eat a meal, you share a photo, you discuss a topic – all out of the choices you make, from an innate sense of what is meaningful and interesting to you. This obviously precludes your inner experience from the book you haven’t read, the movie you haven’t seen or the topic you haven’t discussed. Thats’s a fact of life. Every choice you make is a tradeoff between it and the choices you haven’t made.

But it does not mean you cannot peek outside the filter bubble, outside the algorithm, when you really want to. That too is a choice, and sometimes, it can be a stronger force than Relevance.

Users on the web are task-oriented. They have an objective in mind. It’s your job to point them to the information they seek, as effortlessly as possible. Unlike writing for other mediums, the challenge for any web writer is to keep things brief and anticipate the reader’s requirements.

If your site is an informative one, anecdotes and long introductions will not be effective. Let go of everything you learned in English class. Here’s a set of quick and fast rules to follow to ensure that your writing is efficient and effective:

Keep It Simple
The most important advice you can take when writing content for the web is to keep it short and simple. Visitors to your site will not read every word. So your content should have the most relevant information upfront and other information should be easy to locate.

Make Content Easily Accessible
Web readers are impatient. They don’t read. They scan. They look at headings and subheadings, quickly searching for the information they want. It takes for the average web surfer three to five seconds to decide if they are going to read a web page, or just click away. That’s the time frame you have to grab attention. Use it wisely.

Succinct paragraphs and easily digestible chunks of text are important.
Use lists, descriptive headlines and sub-headlines to help point your users to the most important content.

Use bulleted lists to break up blocks or text.
Provide overviews, especially if the topic is a complex one. It can help the reader decide if this is the information they are looking for.

Write Front-Loaded Paragraphs
Start a paragraph with your conclusion. Visitors to your site want information quickly. You shouldn’t make them wade through unnecessary information to get to the point. You can then follow the paragraph with the rest of the details.

Use Active Voice
Younger users generally have a shorter attention span than older users, so getting to the point immediately is important. Using an active voice will ensure your content is clear and direct. You risk sounding dry and bureaucratic when writing in a passive voice.

Have A Goal
Before you begin, ensure that you know your audience. Who you are talking to? What do you want to say and how you want them to respond? Do you want them to contact you? Or sign up for a service? Lead the user to the next action point.