Innovation, the key thing to bring changes, making the developmental process for this society existing, is the major talk these days. Every company is now getting an innovation department or something more or less the same. “Open Innovation“, as Henry Chesbrough, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, coined describes a growing number of initiatives by companies to reach beyond their own walls to use talent and ideas from others. Open Innovation is supported by various Companies seeking for the fruit from the mass to solve challenging problems with simple and elegant ideas where anyone can participate. InnoCentive, a Waltham (Mass.) company spun out from Eli Lilly (LLY) in 2001 is one of the company running online to recruit Innovators who could be anyone..even you. The key thing is that, these companies are tapping ideas from the mass to bring out changes in the world. Who know, maybe the idea you propose today becomes the world of tomorrow. The challenges ranges from Physics, Chemistry, Science, Engineering, a greener earth and so on. Non-Profit organizations raised challenges, and we, the general people, who have ideas proposed their ideas and you are rewarded if your idea turns out to be the next big thing! Take a look yourself at Innocentive, the places where innovators are groom. See the various sections and the pavillions to find the right topic you are interested at. Open a project room for the challenge you want to participate, make your proposal. Wait for the result. Open Innovation: let’s make a change!
With the launch of the new Orkut, there’s been a lot of expectation from the orkut lovers considering the ongoing competition between the two gaint social networking sites, Orkut and Facebook. Being among one of the few users who got the priviledge to use the new orkut in it’s early phase, I’ve come across numerous flows, or simply un-expected structural non user friendly systems and here, as a viewpoint from a User Experience Designer, I’m giving certain things that needs to be revamp at the earliest.
1) Commenting System
The very first thing that I’m going to talk about is the Fb style commenting system which is just introduced newly with the New version of orkut.
New Orkut Comment Feature
If you’ve gone through the comment text-box, you see that it is a single line text-box. This conceals the beginning part of the comment itself and since we human have a short memory span, we forget what we’ve just typed; or most of the time, we usually read what we’ve written in the comment after finishing typing it, and for that, this make us use the arrow keys or the mouse to look back to what we have written.
Now, let us see how Facebook avoid this system:
Facebook Comment System
In Facebook, the comment text-box is in the form of a multi-line text-box. On top of that, to avoid masking the comment while typing, instead of a scroll bar, the height of the comment box itself keeps on increasing as you press the return key. This is one good example of a nice Facebook feature.
You are almost ready to host your website but you find it puzzling about the various types of webhosting. The market is bursting with webhosting companies offering several types of web hosting services like Shared webhosting, VPS webhosting, Dedicated webhosting and many others. According to your website niche, choosing the right web hosting service is important.
Free webhosting services may sound very tempting but they use to fill the web pages with advertisements that benefit them only. You may lose the targeted traffic due to this reason. Choosing paid webhosting services will make you sure that you are receiving a quality service package with good bandwidth, support system and many other options to help your website to gain success. In this case you need to find a web site hosting service provider that can match to your budget. Webhosting directories are there to help you in finding one right for you.
When you are participating on a huge trade show, the pop up trade show displays will be the perfect choice to display your promotional tools. It is not only for the huge trade shows but pop up displays are also used at retails stores or mega job events as they provide the best effect on the visitors. You can choose among the various shapes or sizes of the trade show pop up displays that can match to your needs at the trade show.
It depends on your choice whether to use a graphic oriented pop up boothsor not. Many of the trade show pop up displays come with added graphics or even if you cannot find one then it can be added later on. If the pop up booths already have the graphics technology, you simply need to Velcro the graphics and start the display. For new and growing companies, those participates the trade shows for the first time should choose the latest pop up trade show displays that has a good quality displays and graphics as well.
If you are one of the person who just bought the latest Apple iPad 2 and are having trouble enabling Airtel’s 3G service, you might want to follow the following steps.
Before this, you need to enable 3G service on your Airtel SIM. If you’ve already activated 3G service, go ahead with the following steps below; if not, text “3G” to 121 to activate 3G service on your Airtel SIM.
Now follow the steps and check out the screenshots:
1) Go to “Settings” from your iPad 2 Home Screen
2) Go to “Cellular Data” on the “Settings” pan on the left (as shown in the snapshot below)
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- iPad Cellular Data Settings
3) Keep the “Cellular Data” On (tap on it to toggle On/Off)
4) Now go to APN settings (step 3 in the snapshot above)
Axure RP
Axure RP Pro is a dedicated tool for prototyping web sites, web applications, for a rapid creation of wireframes and specifications for applications and web sites. It’s based on concepts known from Visio and web design tools, and elegantly combines the best of the two worlds. It is a software tool that encompasses several information architecture deliverables in the one software package.
The main functional elements that Axure can do is create
- Annoated Wireframe
- HTML Prototypes
- Specification Documents
I’ve not gone much into using it but the software seems real interesting as I delve into it, the things it can do.
I’ve come across this a lot of time myself and it made me realise that there is a need to ‘think’ on this issue. To get to the point, just look at the image below and see what has been typed in the text-box.
I’m guessing, your answer probably might be ”yes.. il” or “yes.. ll” or ”yes..tl” or ”yes..H” and it keeps on going!
What I’m trying to point out is that, the text pointer there shades the text typed which created an usability issue. Usually, since the text-box may not be active at the time the user wants to type something, the user brings the pointer right where he wants to type and then click inside the text-box area. This usually leaves the ‘text pointer’ few chars away from the starting point and as the user types on, the characters itself got covered up as can be seen on the image above.
Update:
Check out IXDA discussions on the topic athttp://www.ixda.org/node/27454
Like any other great idea, this thought passed along while I was in the bathroom!!
Google Instant, the hype at the moment, the so call “real instant time” search has changed the way we interact with Google.com. Well delving in a little into the ‘interface’ however, one can always ask, what do we see??
The answer would be Redundancy!!
Here is the Google.com homepage with instant search on.
Google.com Homepage with Instant Search Enabled
So what do we see here. Forget about the top links and the footer links. Let’s try to focus on the main content.
We’ve the Google logo, an extra large search text field, two links on the right to go for ‘Advance Search’ and ‘Language Tools’ and then two buttons, ‘Google Search’ and ‘I’m feeling Lucky’.
Now, I shall give you a task and before continuing reading this article, try it out yourself and come back to this.
The task is simple. Goto www.google.com, type in your name in the search text field and use the button to google it!!
Guidelines are a tool: building a design knowledge management system for programmers (5 years old but still applicable) 1. Designed for developers. Programmers are the users of guidelines. The structure of a tool for them should be built around their needs. 2. Focused around tasks, rather than design elements. The practice of writing software is different from that of designing interfaces, and should be reflected in how documentation for it is structured. 3. Specific, not principles. Programming is an applied art, and specifics address developers’ needs better than theories. Examples that resemble the current situation make it easier to understand the theory and make applying the guideline easier. 4. Prioritized. Design and development is a web of choices, and explicit prioritization helps make some of those choices. Not all guidelines have equal impact. 5. Succinct. Extra words won’t get read and supplementary diagrams will not get examined when the reader is in a hurry, and the reader is always in a hurry. Originally a case study describing the creation of an internal design knowledge management tool for web developers as a means to encourage user-centered development practices.
As a web developer, you need to understand basic knowledges on html, xhtml and css to begin creating a page of your own. Web-articles.info carries a whole lot of articles on html, xhtml and css which are among the best articles for someone learning this scripting languages.
The site carries numerous articles where some of them explains basic steps on many frequently use methods or “how to do it” in plain simple way. Whether you are a beginner or an expert looking for some understanding of how a certain thing is achieved using html, xhtml or css, html xhtml and css @web articles has a lot to tell you. Going through the articles, you will be able to combine the worlds of html, xhtml and css. Topics on “how to use html flexibly”, “Anatomy of an XHTML Document”, working with Cascading Style Sheets and so on are described in details. Articles are added regularly and there is a growing numbers of tutorials in the category as well as other categories available on the main home page of the website. The interesting part is that, if you need a daily fresh updated content for your website in any category available, web articles offers free fresh content for your website.
Of all the articles at web articles, the “anatomy of an xhtml document”by albert lichtblau is one cool article. As the articles quotes
The transition from HTML to XHTML will come with a fair number of bumps. While later chapters introduce tools to help you get past those bumps – and figure out where they come from – this chapter examines what’s going to change and demonstrates a few strategies for handling those changes. Along the way, we visit the ghosts of browsers past and explore problems that exist in current browsers. In turn, you discover how prepared and unprepared various tools are for XHTML.
