Kicks and Kisses

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.