The Slang does it

Before making it cool lets look at the communication

The color scheme softwares and sites

There are couple of sites out there which can help you in choosing colors for ur applications and also help in coming up themes for the stylesheets

• Color Schemer: http://www.colorschemer.com/
• Color Burn :http://www.firewheeldesign.com/widgets/
• Tiger color:http://www.tigercolor.com/
• adobe: http://kuler.adobe.com/
• Color blender:http://colorblender.com/
• Another Color Blender:http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/color-blend/
• Well Styled: http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html

Enjoy painting the website :)

Interaction Design Patterns

The design patterns can be found at

• Jenifer Tidwell's site http://designinginterfaces.com/
• http://www.welie.com/patterns/index.html
• http://harbinger.sims.berkeley.edu/ui_designpatterns/webpatterns2/webpatterns/home.php
• http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/
• http://www.webstyleguide.com/index.html?/contents.html

cheers

Javascript to convert the reverse color value

Here is the small javascript code i wrote to get the reverse color for text on the colored background.

< script type="text/javascript">
function changeColor(colorval){
var colorValue='';
var reverseColor='';
if(colorval.length==4 || colorval.length==7 ){
colorval=colorval.substr(1,colorval.length);
}
if (colorval.length==3){
for(i=0;i<colorval.length;i++){
var colchar=colorval.substr(i,1);
colorValue+=colchar+colchar;
reverseColor+=reverseColorChar(colchar)+reverseColorChar(colchar);
}
}else{
for(j=0;j<colorval.length;j++){
var colchar=colorval.substr(j,1);
reverseColor += reverseColorChar(colchar);
}
colorValue=colorval;
}


document.getElementById('abc').style.background='#'+colorValue;
document.getElementById('abc_text').style.color='#'+reverseColor;
alert(reverseColor);
}

function reverseColorChar(colorChar){
var reverseColorCode=0;
if(colorChar=='0')
reverseColorCode='f';
else if(colorChar=='1')
reverseColorCode='e';
else if(colorChar=='2')
reverseColorCode='d';
else if(colorChar=='3')
reverseColorCode='c';
else if(colorChar=='4')
reverseColorCode='b';
else if(colorChar=='5')
reverseColorCode='a';
else if(colorChar=='6')
reverseColorCode='9';
else if(colorChar=='7')
reverseColorCode='8';
else if(colorChar=='8')
reverseColorCode='7';
else if(colorChar=='9')
reverseColorCode='6';
else if(colorChar=='a')
reverseColorCode='5';
else if(colorChar=='b')
reverseColorCode='4';
else if(colorChar=='c')
reverseColorCode='3';
else if(colorChar=='d')
reverseColorCode='2';
else if(colorChar=='e')
reverseColorCode='1';
else if(colorChar=='f')
reverseColorCode='0';
return reverseColorCode;
}


< /script>

< input type="text" id="colorValue" name="colorValue" value="">
< input type="button" value="change color" onclick="javascript:changeColor(document.getElementById('colorValue').value)">
< div id="abc" style="width:100px;height:100px;border:1px #333 solid;">
< span id="abc_text">here is the text< /div>

Another milestone is Music Sharing

Dekoh released the beta version of the music application (http://www.dekoh.com/music/index.html) which allows you to organize your music-and stream it to your friends. It makes it convenient for all the music lovers out there to share music from their desktop.
What strikes me most is that once i have imported the music i can access it from any mobile device which is connected through internet. Its like having your own radio station. My friends can listen the music from my desktop anytime.... anywhere which i have shared for them. However the internet speed is the only bottleneck at this point of time but on my 128kbps broadband connection it works decently well.

dekoh unleashed

Last few months have been pretty exiting and hectic for me to work on the new web application platform called 'Dekoh'. Its an interesting concept of web sharing where the digital objects like photos, videos, audio etc can be shared without getting worried about the uploading them.
The interface have been developed in Ajax, DWR, flash ..... best of web interaction technologies around this time.
The exciting part is that soon it will become open source where we will find many developers would join hands to take the platform to the next level.

Go through the blogging site to learn more.

Eye Tracking

Ever wondered why eye tracking is important to the user studies? here are few of the links which explains

http://www.etre.com/
http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2006/06/13/eyetracking-worth-the-expense/
http://www.uie.com/articles/eye_tracking_benefits/

http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000040.php
http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm
http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=69884
http://www.upassoc.org/upa_publications/jus/2006_may/bojko_eye_tracking.html
http://experiencedynamics.blogs.com/site_search_usability/2004/12/eyetracking_stu.html
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2776
http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/eyetracking.htm
http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/71/eye_tracking.html
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/newsletters.html
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/video.html

enjoy

BarCamp Hyderabad #2: On Mobile Apps & Infrastructure in the next gen internet

After the phenomenal success of first BarCamp on Web 2.0, the 2nd BarCamp Hyderabad is scheduled for 15th July 2006. Topic is "On Mobile Apps & Infrastructure in the next gen internet". This BarCamp will host some interesting presentations on:

• Gaming
• Mobile phone apps
• Extended Enterprise
• Mobile+Web2.0
• Mo-so-so (Mobile based communities)

Be there....

Mobile UI guidelines

Adding few of the mobile UI guideline resources

A User Interface Designer’s Guide to J2ME and MIDP2
(http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/design/j2meinfo/)


W3C Mobile Web best practices
(http://www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp/)

Nokia guidelines
(http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/1,,200,00.html?topic=Usability)

MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java(tm) Platform, Micro Edition (Bloch/ Wagner): (http://java.sun.com/docs/books/midp/)


Serco's Usability Guidelines
(http://www.serco.com/Images/GPS%20In-car%20Navigation%20Systems%20Guidelines_tcm3-5192.pdf)


Notes from Bell Canada seminar on Location Based Services
(http://farm.tucows.com/blog/Platforms/Mobile/_archives/2006/2/2/1741517.html)

Web 2.0 application in .net

Some of the .net applications based on the .net technologies
Writely: http://www.writely.com
Component art: http://www.componentart.com
imeem: http://www.imeem.com/
Mono: http://www.mono-project.com/

Usability Toolkit

When you are ready for the usability tests, here is what can help you....

The Usability Toolkit is a collection of forms, checklists and other useful documents for conducting usability tests and user interviews.
http://stcsig.org/usability/resources/toolkit/toolkit.html


Recruiting Users as Participants in Usability Studies, Nielsen/ Norman Group.
http://www.nngroup.com/reports/tips/recruiting/

Common Industry Format for usability test reports

The CIF is now available from ISO: ISO/IEC 25062: Software engineering -- Software product Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE) -- Common Industry Format (CIF) for usability test reports

You can find the CIF at the following link:

http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.CatalogueDetail?CSNUMBER=43046&ICS1=35&ICS2=80&ICS3=

BarCamp Hyderabad

barCamp Finished with the marathon of presentations which went till 9:00 pm yesterday. It was nice to see old pals from pramati and progress making presentations. Cordys made their mark with their presentation on the UI. Impressive stuff....
You can find the event reports on the page http://barcamp.org/BarCampHyderabadPostMortem.

Barcamp Hyderabad & Web 2.0

I will be making a presentation on "User experience- parallels in tangible interfaces & Web 2.0" at BarCamp event at Hyderabad on Apr 08,2006. This is a (Un)Conference on Web 2.0 and Next Generation Internet Architectures (details:http://barcamp.org/BarCampHyderabad), where many presenters will be talking about the Web2.0 and how it is changing the web space.

My invitation to all who are in the Hyberabad to come and join the event at IIIT Campus. see you there.

Persona development

It is becoming very important to identify the target users in many of the organizations since the understanding of the users (and not the super users) have helped them to clearly define the exact goals of the product. Here are some of the reads for the persona development

Persona at SAP
http://www.sapdesignguild.org/index.asp?b=/philosophy/User_Experience/cooper.html&t=/philosophy/philosophy_topnav.asp

Steve Mulder's presentation "Bringing more science to persona creation" at the IA Summit
http://www.iasummit.org/2006/conferencedescrip.htm#14

Robert Reinmann’s excerpt from Dan Saffer’s book – http://www.designingforinteraction.com/reimann.html

IDEO – MIT Media Lab on wearable computers
http://www.ideo.com/mit/index.html

Cooper’s:
http://www.cooper.com/content/why_cooper/powerful_personas.asp

RFID

RFID is slowly becoming an integral part of the warehousing. There are some experimental works done in the field:

Timo arnall projects
www.nearfield.org

Chris Noessel paper
http://people.interaction-ivrea.it/c.noessel/RFID/RFID_research.pdf

"RFID Vision in the DOD Supply Chain" at http://www.almc.army.mil/ALOG/issues/MayJun05/rfid.html

RFID Resources
http://www.rfidjournal.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID
http://radiofrequencyidentification.org/
http://www.spychips.com/
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=17981&isYear=1999
http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/~eee05/panel/panel_rfid.html
http://www.rfidgazette.org/
http://www.rfidnews.org/

Tangible Interfaces

Some links to the interesting work done in the field

Eco -Pods
http://www.tiltool.com/Eco_Pods.htm

MIT Tangilbe Media Group
http://tangible.media.mit.edu/

Some TUI applications...
http://www.ehornecker.de/Tangibles.html

Open Source TUIs
http://www.sonicforms.org/

TUIs in biology
http://www.scripps.edu/mb/olson/tangible_models/

Emerging framework for TUIs
http://tangible.media.mit.edu/content/papers/pdf/ullmer-isj00-tui-framework-pub.pdf

Thesis - Augmented reality TUIs for CAD design review http://www.hci.iastate.edu/TRS/THESES/MS-Ronald-Sidharta-2005.doc

CLI- Command line interfaces

Some interesting reads on the command line interfaces

In the Beginning was the Command Line
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html


about Unix CLI conventions
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/graphics/taoup.pdf



Principles and Guidelines in Software User Interface Design-author
Deborah Mayhew's

Text label & field Alignment in Applications for international audience

While designing the applications for international audience, many a times software fails while displaying the text labels (it turncates) or face aligment issues. Here is the Tip for developers

The text label should be placed above the textfield/textarea. This will take care of expansion of text label (eg in Chinese, Indic) and alignment(eg Arabic).
example
==============================================
Name:
___________
[___________]

==============================================
Here are some of the interesting read on the topic

Microsoft Windows XP SP2: Internationalization Best Practices
http://www.bhashaindia.com/MSProducts/XpSp2/Articles/I18NBestPracitces.aspx

Localisation and Internationalisation
http://www.issco.unige.ch/projects/ecolore/localisation/Components/White%20Papers/lecture7_handout.pdf

Microsoft PowerPoint - Pan_Asian_Summit1
http://www.panl10n.net/Presentations/Pan_Asian_Summit1.pdf

The impact of Internationalization on Guidelines Contents and Usage
http://www.isys.ucl.ac.be/bchi/publications/2003/Vanderdonckt-UAHCI2003.pdf

I18n in Software Design, Architecture and Implementation
http://developers.sun.com/dev/gadc/technicalpublications/articles/archi18n.html

Case study
http://www.sigchi.org/chi97/proceedings/briefing/jfk.htm#U29

GUI Design Softwares

A lot of time UI designers are struggling with the deadlines and don't even have time to test the application. There are quite a few softwares available which can help to make quick and dirty prototype.

For web

• Dreamweaver
• Axure
• Denim

For Desktop

• Visio
• Flash
• GUI Design Studio

I have written an application for developing the web interfaces pretty fast and quick... yet to publish for the community.