We recently updated our homepage to make the information more relevant and quickly accessible. One of the main idea was to highlight our newly added case studies and white-papers for our visitors.
We would love to hear your feedback on our new facelift.
Our motto for ultimate User Experience is to make every application Simple, Beautiful and Usable. Beautiful part can be achieved by some Photoshop magic and creative instincts. To achieve simplicity and usability one has to have very good overview of the entire application to make sure that the information architecture caters to easy access of information and also has the intuitiveness to make its adoption easier.
One of the key stages of any good design is its wire-framing stage. This is the stage which really helps you think through the entire application and come up with creative ideas. Recently in one of the Refresh DC’s events I came to know about a library of readily available wireframe templates and libraries named Unify. I encourage you all to explore its videos and try to use it in your design practices.
Few other resources: I Love Wireframes
If you know any good resources on wireframes then please do share them in comments section.
This post will be serving as a live broadcast for our Usability Event which is going to be held tomorrow Tuesday, December 2, 2008. So, please, bookmark it for the live updates. It’ll be great, but a lot depends on the wifi availability there.
A detailed overview of the event will be a part of our post event activity, and live updates will help us gather more and more public opinions. Bloggers/web analysts/user experience gurus/usability geeks are welcomed to blog about it on their blogs and or write us their views.
Feedback will be highly appreciated, so stay tuned!
Follow us at Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/zigron
Whether it’s consumer electronics, desktop software or a web application, usability comes first, i.e. the ease with which the user will use that product. The evolving technologies, geographical differences etc though cause a little variation, but standards are almost same everywhere. Usability itself is a standard, and any new, or enhanced product must follow the usability guidelines.
Being a product developer, why should you care about Usability is a single question with hundreds of answers, some known and many hidden. Discussion is the only way to explore all those, and so Zigron Inc. and CDF Software arranged a seminar on Usability in collaboration with NUST Islamabad. Seminar will be held on Tuesday, December 2, 2008 from 5 pm to 8 pm (PST) at NUST Sector H-12, Islamabad Campus.
The seminar will be a sort of discussion on current Usability practices round the world, the difference and similarities, the best and the successful, and the emerging trends. Another interesting part of the seminar will include a documentary on design Helvetica. Panelists of the seminar are people from different software houses of Islamabad and NUST, i.e. Babar Khan (ikonami), Faizan Buzdar (Scrybe), Haris Khan (Zigron), Osama Hashmi (CDF Software), Murad Akhter (Tintash) and Dr. Khalid Latif (NUST).
The purpose of seminar is to discuss the Usability standards with specific reference to modern technologies, to make better use of it within our domains and to create awareness among future entrepreneurs.
To register, please RSVP here or you can also register on Facebook.
Recently I got hold of this website which has applied cartogram on the Presidential Election results. It’s a great way to show relevance, visually.
Some of the images are as below.
2008 presidential election results on a population cartogram:
Electoral college by scaling the sizes of states to be proportional to their number of electoral votes:
Based on County-level election returns:
After the successful launch of PingMyCompany, Zigron decided to develop a more interactive site where employees of different companies can have real fun. It’s DareMyCompany, whereby one company can dare others to compete in anything. For instance, lately a team of MOHAA players from Zigron had a match with MediaLinkers.
It’s not only about daring companies locally, instead you can dare an overseas company, for instance for design and development contests. So be as innovative as you can to dare companies in the areas where no one has ever dared them.
Each company when registered will have a Dare Profile with all their stats. There’s a ladder also for company’s position, and it gets updated as any two companies have a contest, and post their result.
Soon we will publish the exact rules for using the ladder and how positions are calculated. Till then please enjoy the site and start challenging other firms.
This week I had the pleasure to attend An Event Apart design conference. It was a great experience to hear some great presentations and learn new approaches towards design. In next few posts I will try to share all of my experiences.
Starting off the best presentation of the day one was by Jason Santa Maria who is the Creative Director at Happy Cog studios. It was about “Storytelling by Design”. He had raised a very good point that why the design experience on a Wired in-print magazine is so different then Wired’s web experience. The point was that in-print designers try to set the mood around the content but on the web we lose the esence of story telling and just focus on content. Ironically, I think it should be the other way round as we have more tools and independence on the web. The other issue designers face is that we don’t have the control on the medium. Unlike print where the designer can exactly control the layout web designers are at the mercy of browser type, screen resolution and personal settings.
A very interesting book site NoOneBelongsHereMoreThanYou.com 
was shared as a case study for its out of box approach.I agree with Jason that its wonderfully done and it has a very unique approach. The image on the the left is the homepage and you will see that it doesn’t have any traditional elements like About Us or Info rather it has a compelling text which draws you in. Similarly I also liked Jason’s site, which tries to break away from conventional design and take each post as an individual story that’s why you will see different design around each post.
Great visual design which has a story to tell has been around for many years and its very apparent from the below example of Charles Joseph Minard graphic illustration of Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812. If you move from left to right, the design illustrates the size of Napoleon’s army in yellow when he started his march toward Russia and moving from right to left in black you can see the size of his army when he was returning to France. Its amazing to see that how a simple design explains such an dramatic event in history. I think at the end it was just Napoleon and his buddy who reached back.
Jeffry Zeldman also gave an interesting example of how conflict between design and marketing team can result in a funny situation. RealPlayer wants to be a dominat player in media players but on Real.com it seems that someone was able to convience the the company to psuh a paid version of realplayer down our throat by making free version very hard to find. Apparently someone wants us to download the paid version only. Nice job!!
At the end I will also encourage you to viist a design site named Fray.com which has some great visual stories. In my next post I will share some more great snippits on design and in the meanwhile if you know some other great design sites then please share them in comments.
For some time I have noticed that in blogosphere, User Xperience has mostly been associated with Web 2.0 companies and hardware devices, well actually only one hardware i.e iPhone. So I decided to go out and see where I can find innovation in UX apart from the web.
On this great adventure the first experience I stumbled across was Bank Of America’s ATM on Van Ness street in San Francisco. I had this old check, which I was planning to deposit for sometime, but hesitated because my last experience with Chase’s ATM in Chicago to deposit a check was very clumsy. One had to seal the check in an envelope, which the machine will vent out and then write the amount and your account info on top of it. One also has to feed in the check amount. Usually I don’t have a pen with me so it was another embarrassing moment and interestingly most ATM machines have a slanting face which makes it even harder to use it as base to write on it.
Anyway this time around, when I was expecting the ATM to throw an empty envelope out, it just asked me to slide the check in a slot which had a blinking light. For a moment I was taken a back and didnt know what to do but the ATM kept beeping. After gaining some intelligence I decided to slide the check in and said to myself that worst come to worst I will just lose it as it wasn’t that big of an amount. It was from a friend who owed me some grocery money, luckily she wasn’t that hungry while grocery shopping.
Eager to see what will happen, the ATM showed me the scanned copy of my check with the exact amount to two decimal points. It had scanned it on the fly and by using some recognition software had understood my friends handwritten amount to the exact amount. While I was still star struck and excited with the experience, I had my receipt in my hand with a scanned printout of the actual check I just deposited.
Now I call this a true user experience. Next time I will make a video of it. So feel free to send me some checks and please feel free to be liberal with the amount 
