Kicks and Kisses

Just back from the barber. While he was working on my hair, with massages in between, between bouts of sleep this thought came into mind. And this I have been seeing for around 2 years. Whenever they have to use the razor they’ll make you see that they are removing the old blade and throwing it in a container, which would have a pile of these used blades. The idea behind this is that they want the customer to know that he is using a brand new blade for him. So AIDS awareness has been good I think.
But what becomes a side effect is that each blade gets used only once.
Which means:

a blade doesn’t have to have a long life

and that it has to be the cheapest possible

So the market dynamics for the razor blade companies whose main customers where the barbers would have changed in the last 2-3 years.

How to make users do stuff. To get them to check pending emails, comments, notifications?
My gmail has 150 unread mails. Now most of these are random mails which I don’t want to read. But still there is this momentary thought of marking them as read just to clean up my inbox. But the task of going through all the pages searching is a task I am not very fond of. So the task remains.
Similarly in facebook whenever a friend invites me for an app, a notification comes up. And the number of notifications which I haven’t checked has increased to quite a number. I noted today that facebook is taking a few number of tasks from the whole and showing them apart. These pictures will give a better idea.

And I realized how this is better than showing just “40 new notifications”, as I actually clicked on the smaller task. The comedy in this is both these links go to the same page even. Still people will click it. I think this is a lesson in human psychology.

Do you think big corporate websites should have a sense of humour? whatever you think some of them do. If you type “chuck norris find” and press “I’m feeling lucky” you would see what I mean.

Earlier I had written about Flickr’s use of pop culture lingo here.

via mayank

updated on 5th may ‘08 —-

on swamy’s comment i checked again and found this text at the bottom of the page

This page has no affiliation with Google
Created by Arran Schlosberg

and the “Support this site” leads to a page which says this

The goal of this site is to have the top Google ranking with the keywords “Chuck Norris” so that when these are searched for using the “I’m feeling lucky” function this page will appear.

So swamy you were right :).

What is kwippy? - a micro/nanoblogging webapp + IM status logger + social network

Why another microblogging app when there are already plenty out there? - There is twitter, pownce, jaiku, and 10 other similar ones. Though all of these promote small posts, each has a different kind of social network.

On twitter you mostly meet strangers. By strangers I mean people you don’t know in the real world. It’s like barcamp, or a conference where you go partly to network. You meet fellow bloggers, marketeers, and people from your field. Yes friendships may grow among them, but mostly there are subtle motives behind the tweets. From promoting your blog, selling your product, showing your expertise, etc.

Pownce is geared more towards file sharing, sharing media (youtube, mp3s) etc. And it has an AIR instant messenger kind of software which makes it a little closer to an Instant Messeger.

In kwippy, the whole focus is on the Instant Messenger. The friends list on the instant messenger is the most intimate friends list you can find, of all social networks. It gives the people in the list immediate access to your attention. People share their joys (i got a raise), sorrows (i flunked my english papers), their favorite links, and thousand other things through their status messages. And all these people also have a list of their closest friends on their list. And like in the real world when a real friend introduces you to another person, the chances that you hit it off are greater. There’s this trust thing which is automatic.

So there - kwippy has a social network which gets real friends, friends you could meet. And it stores all your status messages, which become your emotional timeline.

We have been working on it since some time, and now it is in testing. If you would like to check it out, and give your invaluable suggestions for improvement, either go to kwippy.com, or comment here.

LinkedIn has become a marketing tool for working professionals. At the same time it has also become a great tool for potential recruiters to find out/cross check the candidature. More and more consultants are trying to add you in their network. You approve it and you get a call next minute for a Job opportunity in xyz company.

I just thought about the “Trust” keyword regarding LinkedIn profiles. How accurate are people in writing about their title, work experience, skills, breaks etc. These types of discrepancies are always there. People write wrong information in their CV’s too. But one can discover the same while interviewing a potential candidate.

I came across one such profile. I knew the person and his profile in his current company. He is a senior software engineer but he wrote his role as Manager in LinkedIn profile. Later some people in his organization complained against him to management and he changed his profile on LinkedIn.

Recommendation is one of the great tools. But some how I feel it’s not that efficient. I have lots of endorsement requests pending in my inbox. I will endorse all of them one day, may be when I need such endorsements. I endorsed you so please endorse me. But if somebody writes about you it works like magic

Simpler tools can be design to give credential to one candidate. Credential can bring trust factor in particular profile. This credential can be given by people in your network, people outside of your network, old manager, new manager, technical person who interviewed you once, a consultant who talked to you once. There could be number of ways to do it. Statistical equations can serve as back bone for such tool and make great results.

At the same time there could be social implications of such tools. Even there is a possibility of frauds in any such tool. But an Intelligent credential tool can really help potential recruiter to quickly identify a right candidate.

Flickr greeted me in LOLcat :).

Pop cuture goes mainstream?

So its not just parsing the text and showing relevant ads. There is either a human involved or they have some awesome AI. Very obvious but very clever, showing “fat loss” on a recipe page.

A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. - Douglas Adams

The customary quote out of the way, KicksandKisses is a Design and Usability Blog started by Gajendra Agrawal and K.A Anand. It would mainly deal with user experience of systems. But that said it may have anything depending upon the whims and fancies of it’s creators.

The purpose of the Blog is to make users aware about Usability issues of a product or a system. At the same time helping them to make a usable product choice. This Blog will also be useful for engineers and designers to take feedback about design and usability to further improve upon their innovation.

p.s. Feel free to thrash both of them if you see errors in reasoning :).

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Gajendra Agrawal is a User Interface Designer. After graduating from , IIT Guwahati in Design, he worked with one of India’s major telecom providers. Currently he is working with a leading software product company in India.
Gajendra’s professional interests include social computing and information visualization and writing design reviews. Apart from design, he enjoys travelling and socializing.
He can be reached at gajendra.agrawal [at]gmail.com

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K.A.Anand or kaa is an Interface developer. After graduating from IIT Bombay in Metallurgical Engineering and Material Science he moved onto more interesting things. He worked for a year in mumbai for a leading animation/design studio and designed for bollywood films. Then he freelanced for a year providing consultancy and services for corporate clients in fields ranging from e-learning and business enterprise management. He is now part of the team designing and developing SlideShare. In his spare time he likes to sleep under the sky and watch clouds go by. He can be reached at k.a.anand [at]gmail.com.