Kicks and Kisses

Can you make a paper airplane?

I can, and I have seen only a very few who cannot. I at different stages of my life have made lots of different origami/papercraft. But the only two or three things which I still remember are the paper airplance and the paper boat.

But unlike the paper frogs and other such things, I did not learn how to make a paper airplane from teachers. I don’t even remember who taught me that. From what I can recall from my own experience and from what I have seen, the source of this knowledge is either a peer(friend, classmate,etc) or an elder (big brother,uncle). Now if you think you agree read on, or the rest will not make much sense. Now why do these two groups of people teach you something as trivial(?) as a paper plane.

Friends: Often the friend is just showing to show of his newly acquired skills. Getting the “ooh he can make such a nice plane” from others. Then one of his close friends would ask him (or request him) to teach him too. Or someone just grabs a plane and reverse engineers it (very unlikely though).

Elders: I definitely believe that every elder has a child sleeping inside. When a elder wants to impress a kid he loves (the typical uncle), he would make one.

What is the difference between the two? I think “making an impression” is there in both cases. In the second case it might be a little less, it could also be the self gratification of making a toy for a kid.

Who could be the first person who invented/discovered it? How did a few designs travel time(generations) and space (countries and cultures). We can learn a lesson or two in virality from paper planes. Would be very useful in making useful social applications.

Where the application designer does not impose the “invite your friends”.

Where people would search for such a functionality and if it is not there demand it.

I was shopping for groceries in my nearby vegetable market, when I saw this.

A little background info first. Vegetables in our country (India) are generally sold by smalltime hawkers. These hawkers may not even have a fixed shop. They get the vegetables from the whole sale sellers who are generally at the outskirts of the town/city. These wholesale sellers get them directly from the adjoining villages.

Compare this to the veggies that are sold in supermarkets. These supermarkets(the big chains at least) also get them directly from the producer, but they process the veggies (peel the peas, cut the cauliflowers) etc so that people find them easy to use. Given the lack of time and inclination who wouldn’t pay some extra cash for the convinience.

But this innovative seller was processing the greens (spinach and others), cutting them with his revolving cutter and selling it at the same rate as the other sellers. Obviously he had more customers.

Value addition tip #1 : Give your customers a little something more (something which will make there lives easier/happier) at around the same price as the competition.

There are different types of web applications out there. Some are based on content. Youtube and Flickr will fall into a content sharing site with a social network built in. People upload videos and pics and then share it with there online and real world friends using its different features. If we neglect small differences in features it’s about the same. One big difference though, Youtube is google searchable while Flickr is not.

What does this imply?

That considerable hits from youtube would come from google search. Now there is a high possibility that those who searched for a term and then came through google to a youtube video page, either:

1. did not know about youtube
2. did know about youtube, but did not think it would have what they needed.

In any case once they reach a youtube video page, there are two further possibilities:

1. they find what they were looking for
2. though close they need more precise result
3. they don’t like the result and go out of youtube

In both 1 & 2 if the video is surrounded by more related things, the chances of the user staying there longer increases. Now a video in youtube is surrounded by different things. Below it is what the registered users can do with it, favorite it, send it to friends, etc. On the right is the metadata, details of the video. Below that is the related videos. In 1024 resolution I can only see two of the related videos above the fold.

The question is if the percentage of users from google users is really great, should the related videos get more limelight?

The overall bigger question here is while some sites say Twitter or Pownce would have (my opinion, i have no data) less people coming from google. So the design should be optimised more for the registered users or for the people who know what the service is about. While other sites where data is more generic say Scribd, SlideShare or Youtube (in parts, ads, music videos and such) can expect a lot of traffic from google and should optimise for such users.

In short is your web app by the people or for the people?

I will tell you people a story today. Well not a whole story, just an incident.
So the evil man got in the way of The Bride. And his head fell in one neat stroke of her katana. If I make this into a movie there are two ways I can go from here. One is the gory japanese style ala Ichi the Killer, of which Quentin Tarantino is quite a follower. Another is the regular action film, where the director has chosen the genre of the film as non-gory, decides to just let the blood flow slowly. What do you think will happen to the evil man?

We will discuss scientifically what should happen lest the above incident actually happens outside a studio.

Why? Why oh why? What is the need of such a discussion do you ask. Becaue there is a difference between the science questions we grew up solving in school and that we encounter in our day to day life. In the school questions, all the variables are defined. You already know what is known and what you have to find out. In the real world the exact problem is not very evident. It is not even evident that there’s a scientific question around. There are prejudices, supersition, common sense and a lot of other such words floating around. So if you know what the exact problem is, the solution is just elementary school standard.

The above diagram is pretty self evident. And apart from the normal pressure head, there is a lot of lose in pressure due to kinks and bends in the pipe.

So when someone is beheaded, the pressure at which the blood will spurt out is =

P = (density of blood) X (gravity) X (height of head) + (a considerable lose factor)

Since our arteries are pretty branched the lose factor will be quite high.

Conclusion is that the blood will spurt for a moment of time to a height close to the top of the head (at least). The at least is because extraneous factors like the air resistance, the lose factor, etc. After the initial moment of spurt since the system is now not closed (less amount of blood in the system), the speed of the splurting blood will ebb and then change to a flow.

Adobe has released Buzzword. Looks very nice, have to explore it more. What struck me was the use of an image in place of an icon. Gandhiji’s picture has been used for the image icon.

No wonder though, because he is the ICON and now we have proof that the world thinks so.

Book covers are my second most favorite art meets commerce products. Next only to album covers. If you want to while a small amount of time, and there is a book shop nearby go and browse. If you are a book loving person so much the better, but even if you are just an art or a design lover, go look at the covers.

A cover gives the book a small 5-10 second period to entice the readner’s curiousity. Once the reader picks up the book, then the onus of convincing the reader to buy the book goes to blurbs (by famous authors, newspapers etc), forward, preface, etc.
Anyway the book covers down below are vying for the best cover 2007. There are a lot more at The book design review page. You may want to go there and vote :).

Email could be business decisions, system failure alert or an opportunity in peer group.
It has more meaning than just information. Emails have become more of management tool. You become forerunner if you access & respond fast.
I have multiple email accounts. Even multiple accounts in single email client for different purposes. Every time I have to log on to many accounts. Once I signed out,I no longer know whether it has got a new email. There are lots of sync mechanisms. Import mechanism, which can import email from one inbox to other.But still I think it lacks a good design. There are many add on software available which can manage multiple email accounts. But I check my emails on different machines.

Gmail itself is well designed with awesome search capabilities. Can I use this design and search to access my outlook and Yahoo mail ? Consider a design I am proposing.

From the drop down user selects one account and it loads all the emails in this skeleton J . One doesn’t have to go different email clients. Different sign in. If I am checking my Gmail account. A pop-up can inform me whether I have received an email in my outlook and vice versa. All my Gmail tags can be replaced by the folders name if I select my Yahoo ID. I am not sure technically how much can be achieved but strategically this utility can simply multiply Google’s email business revenue.

I was strolling in Manali when I saw these signs.

It was on a lunch house, and typical of tourist places it served everything from regional specialities (punjabi, gujarati) to chinese. In particular the punjabi thali and gujarati thali, was written in punjabi and gujarati script respectively.

At first glance it seems very obvious. If your target audience is punjabi, it makes sense to write the punajbi dish name in punjabi script. But the downside is that some people who love punjabi food but can’t read punjabi script won’t be able to understand.

Let’s look at what some global websites are doing to solve this problem. We have to keep in mind that there are other constraints when it comes to web. To keep it simple lets say we want to provide a list of languages a site is available in. So that a user who wants to see the site in that language can select the required option. The following image shows how youtube does it.

Say you go to a japanese cyber cafe and you see this. And if you want to see an english site, to choose the english option, you have to know an english speaking countries flag. Easy for the person of that country, not so for someone else. Still youtube has at least tried to solve the problem to some extent.

Now lets look at BBC’s world service site. Now they could have put each language in that respective script. So that people who can only read that script could have chosen that option easily. But that would have meant that all those people who don’t have those font-packs installed on their machines would have seen some thing like this (????? question marks for non existant fonts). Hence BBC has put the language name in the respective script as an image. So that everyone sees everything, no question marks. As well as the user who knows only one language still can choose his language. Then why they have written that language again in english? So that everyone can know which languages it is available. Since this is just the landing page, and this being the world service page, I think the aim of this page is to show that it is truly global. Which the language names written in english does.

This is what I call good design.

Intentionally, I never click advertisements. But some time I do by mistake. There will be many people doing such clicks by mistake every minute. I always try to close the popup/New window/ Tab as soon as I come to know that I have done it by mistake. For every click advertiser has to pay. I assume that there would be millions of waste clicks every day.

I don’t get anything out of this click nor the advertiser. For my mistake advertiser has to pay the money. This will be shared by ad publishing company and the publisher. Sometime I think that advertiser should pay only if the viewer stays for some time on the website. Even the payment can be mapped in proportion with time of stay on the website. There should be some tools to measure user’s activity on the advertiser’s websites. The payment could go to maximum, if the viewer makes any transactions. Amazon has somewhat similar Model. They only pay once the viewer purchase the books after landing to Amazon. They don’t pay by impression or click. This is more meaningful contextual advertising.

Ad publishing companies are eating part of this waste click money. This click=$ phenomena also motivates the website owners to get more and more clicks. There are number of misleading websites design with one goal of clicks only on ads.

When I first came across embeds, namely youtube type video embeds, I thought them strategically stupid. If you could view the whole video, why would anyone go to the site. Some would, but many wouldn’t. Though they have made the whole embed (except the controls) a link to that page on their site. But that relies on users mistakenly clicking on it.

They could have put in the first 20% then show some text which says, “To view the remaining video please go to this page”. There could have been many ways in which more people could be diverted to their site. And currently the site is where the advertising money is. Is their another reason they decided to put the whole video in the embed?

Recently I saw the related and more videos inside the embeds, in youtube. Also users can customize their embeds with playlists. Now this is even more amazing. Earlier with just one video, some people would still like to go the site to view the related videos, but now even that has come to the embed. This clearly proves that there definitely is some thought behind this. Now what could that be?

I found this video in Mashup, it is a recorded sighting of an ad inside a youtube embed.

Companies like Revlayer (not active right now), have come up, offering solutions for embed ads.And I think this is just the beginning. Initially the embeds may have seemed a very philanthropic venture.

Now people are changing there embed codes into DIVs. Which means we could start seeing even google adsense ads in the embeds. Also sites can use that space for flashing news, announcements, etc. And why can’t they start doing registrations from embeds too?

If I could use a little exaggerated analogy, while embeds started of on a parallel to a TV network. Each embed was a channel with just one program. Now it has changed to each channel having many programs (the related videos). In the long run, I guess it will change into a multi-headed vacuum cleaner sucking in eyeballs.

And so gradually these sites will start monetizing the billion square pixels real estate on so many embeds.

Editted on 24th jan 2008

Revver has started showing text ads over their video player. See the image.