Kicks and Kisses

As most ads have copy, this one caught my eye. On the header of instructable, it was just a series of images. And the first think which came into my mind when I saw the ad was what is it. And when I was about to click it I realized it was an ad. I guess more people are deliberately shying away from clicking on ads. Which is making ad designers create ads which do not look like ads.

Google shows search results from India even when the radio button for “the web” is selected. Either it should show the real results or when it tries to be “helpful” it should change the selected radio button to “pages from India”.

update: I just realized that even if it wants to “help” me real bad it should show me the links from the place I am browsing. Namely pubs in Delhi.

The number of mobile users in India has topped 310m and increasing at the rate of 1m every week. Increasing competition bringing down the calling rates. In this scenario, Value Added Services (VAS) have become significant revenue source for mobile operator. These value added services are being provided to end users via SMS, MMS, Push Messaging, voice portals, WAP etc.

User is being lured by massive advertising and promotions to use these services. Sometimes operator do not tell the complete details of the service or if they tell the steps are so complicated that an unaware customer can’t understand. Users land-up paying money sometimes for nothing. Example: Reliance Mobile Launched a VAS called “Call me |93 231 33333”. The advertising campaign shows celebrities asking viewers to call them to know about their caller tunes and to subscribe caller tunes services (A caller tunes is some music instead of Tring-Tring which a caller listen while calling other user). When you call on such a number you hear some music (celebrities caller tune) and than a recorded voice “Hi I am Riya, like my tunes you can get one too, just follow the instruction coming up” Instruction: To set this as your ringback tone press 1. To choose many more caller tone dial 1234 and it goes. 

 Bad Design Details:

1. The voice portal design is such that it forces user to use the service. At every steps it asks the user to press certain number to continue. It leaves no options to exit, more info, help, and talk to customer care etc.
2. During subscription and after subscription the service/ service provider does not inform about “How to unsubscribe”. User has to call customer care. Even customer care executive don’t do it for a user. Customer care will ask you to send an SMS “UNSUB” to 1234 to unsubscribe.
3. It auto renews the subscription every month without calling / sending an SMS to user.
4. The usage cost of these services is as high as Rs. 6/- per minute (Like making an ISD Call).It pressurize one to make quick decision, this also increases the rate of errors.

In short it can be said that some of the design decision has being taken in order to maximize revenue. These design decision leads user to forcefully use the service or sometime leads to make mistake which increases the revenue to telecom operator.

One can find trendy people in small town or villages too. These people keep abreast themselves with latest fashion trends /gadgets / mobiles. These user segment watch television, read local newspapers and socialize. Keeping a costly, stylish mobile phone with them becomes a style statement among other people of the village. They might not know the handset model no but they have their own methods to tell which model they are referring to. TV ad reference is one method.

These users also have the buying power of such gadgets. When the crop season comes and they receive the money they will buy the new motor cycle, May be a Car, New TV, A direct to home television service etc. Local resellers keep this in mind and make collection of such product at that time.

I found an interesting example of how computer illiteracy leads to new small businesses. These trendy people use mobile phones but they are not competent enough to connect mobile phone from a PC and transfer music, video, ringtones, addressbooks etc. They also don’t know how to use Bluetooth but they use the handset which has Bluetooth.

To fill this gap some knowledgeable people who owns an electronic shop starts doing business of loading content in mobile phone. They would call / sell this as “Mobile downloading”. They will feed pirated music, video, Bollywood movies in their mobile phones. They would charge a small amount for this. One can find this small shop on road side.

The small shop owner will write this ad in front of his shop in the local language (मोबाइल डाऊंनलोडिंग ). The downloading term itself. Mobile owner has learned to associate this downloading term with mobile content feeding.

I have seen this user segment playing music / video in public place with a loud volume. When they were sitting on a tea joint or socializing with other people

I had written how embeds are a window into other peoples pages in this post: “Embeds are Octopussy“. Some of the things which I had predicted are now online. This screenshot from a youtube embed says a hundred words, so I’ll shut up.

I have got myself a new domain, rega.in. I have tried to make it a repository of all my posts in different blogs. From now on, any post I make in kicksandkisses will be mirrored there too.

Came across this job site - called workosaur.com. It’s USP being, it has the most 7 figure salary jobs. Good but no great shakes. Another job site I thought.

But then I saw a link on the top corner which said, “Boss is Around? Look Busy”. When clicked lead to a page full of graphs and charts.

This minor thing made me look again at the site. It tells me that this is a startup where people love their work. That they understand their niche audience. So it tells me to take them seriously. Kudos for the sense of humor.
Earlier posts on sense of humor:here

Vizu provides customized poll widgets for Blogs and web. A publisher can set up a public question with desired no of options. The publisher can access the results from his Vizu account.  These poll widgets are best useful to get public opinion either to enhance your product / service or to conduct a survey. It shows current stats after voting. You get to know your opinion is public opinion or not. 

Vizu is best suited for casual opinion / survey. Recently I saw Vizu is being used to gauge public voting for a design competition. There was a prize for publicly voted entry. There were 8 participants and everybody was using their social networks to get ahead of others. Vizu was showing instant result and this was motivating them

The product is technically very sound. It does not allow you to make multiple votes from the same IP.  This also has cross browser linking. If one has done voting from Firefox, one can not make vote from IE. But in case of dialup connection there are programs through one can acquire dynamic IP. This can significantly change the results.

But a small feature would have made this product more useful. Providing an option to publisher whether he want to publish the results immediately after the poll or want to set a time line for the result. So it’s up to the publisher when he wants to publish the results. No body will get to know the stats till a deadline. Showing results after a poll can motivate people to make fraudulent votes. If the publisher is using this for casual survey he can show the stats immediately after the casting the vote. If its being used for some serious purpose than publisher can set up a deadline. This can significantly bring transparency in the result

Email systems has a great system in place to filter spam. Human intervention adds to its filtering capabilities by making classification of a particular email. “Report Spam” and “Not spam” have become almost standards in all the web email clients. I am not sure about corporate email clients. Still I receive spam emails in my inbox sometimes.

Mobile communication still lacks a system in place regarding spam. At the same time spam level is not so intense. Spam is still limited to promotional / alerts / telemarketing calls and messages.  For some users getting an insurance investment call could be useful. For some users it might be quite disturbing in-between work. I get a significant no of telemarketing calls. I feel like comparing no of telemarketing calls on my mobile versus Viagra emails in my Gmail spam folder per day.

Once my mobile gives a message notification. I feel like opening it. Guess most of the time either its bank alerts or promotional messages. I have done enough of “don’t disturb me” stuff. Guess it does not work as efficient as expected.

I think when once receives a voice call, the screen should flash whether it’s banking/shopping category call. If one is interested one can receive the call. Also after one finishes a call there should be mechanism to tell the system whether it was a spam call for you. After sometime there will be a pool of spam numbers in the system. Changing a telephone no is not as easy as creating a mail account for spam.

Unlike spam folder all my unwanted text messages can reach to a spam folder in my mobile without notifying me every time. When I am getting bore at airport I should be able to check all promotional, unwanted alert messages.  I hope for a spam free mobile communication in near future

Showing network updates (what buddies are up to?) is becoming a common feature in almost all social networks. Be it Facebook, Orkut, Linkedin. Everybody get to know what others are doing in my network. New contact, new pictures in my album, which social application I have added etc. This is completely contextual to type of social network.
In case of Orkut and Facebook , this feature can add value to social networks aiming towards dating, friendships. It gives an opportunity to explore similar tastes with a buddy. From the business angle it keeps user engaged on the network. More engagement means more money.
Showing network updates to all buddies can have different implications. I interpret this feature in different way In Business networking applications. If my office colleague is adding a recruitment consultant, this forces me to think something. I think all the activities one does on a network should not be visible to others. There should be a some level of privacy preference whether one wants to display the updates to his/her network.
Before social network launch a feature be it a network update or photo album feature they must do an implication analysis. Orkut initially had a photo album feature in profile but now they have put a privacy element in it. Girls used to receive large number of unknown friend requests. Orkut added this privacy element to prevent engendered behavior.