DESIGN THINKING

1. Reading on web : When you read newspapers or surf through internet, do you read every word? Well..I don’t really think so! We generally skim or scan pages to find what interests us and keep our religious reading to that piece in particular. EYE TRACKING is always the famous F pattern as shown in the figure. To make it simple, the most important things of a site, like a call to action, or attention seeking content have to be placed around the highlighted area. When any human looks through a site, these are the focus areas and whatever has been put there are likely to decide if the user stays at the page or get away. 2. The 3 click rule : Gone are those days when a piece of information could be found in 3 clicks. These days, we have so much content on a website, that this law ought to go obsolete and they can no more be parameters to judge user satisfaction and success rates. What really counts here is ease of navigation. I would not mind a series of clicks, which DON...

One fine day I was all set for an interview in a software company. I had applied as a User Experience Designer. There were rounds of interviews, and then finally the HR came in and said “You talk about user experiences but nowhere you have mentioned about any sort of technical expertise like HTML5, CSS3, Adobe etc. in your resume..” He was expecting me to create actual interfaces for his products and all my efforts in convincing him was of no use that day. Two days later, I received a call again and was told that the CEO wanted to have a meeting. With all the prelusions in mind I was trying to be receptive. He was a man of nearly 40 years or may be more but young at heart. I was perceptive about the opportunity I had got and talked to him very outright. This discussion changed it all and he painted new from the scratch. Very beautifully he convinced me to choose between two names for my role ‘Functional Consultant’ or ‘User Experience Designer’, and at the same time he mentioned it w...

What is a product? Anything and everything that we are surrounded with is a product. Well.. saying that, reminded me of Amir Khan in 3 idiots, “pen ki nib se pant ki zip tak sab machine hai sir!”. Everything from daily home appliances, consumables, locomotives, computers, mobile phones are products. Earlier, we confined our thoughts to a physical object, when said products, but these days even softwares and programs are coined as products. Design is a part of our lives from eve’s era, which we have, in recent years, designated to different roles like product designer, design thinker, user experience designer and the list goes on and on. Behind every product you shall find a designer associated and a history to explain every phase it has gone through, a reason for every changes that has been made. Have you ever imagined how was the idea nurtured? Have you tried to learn how did they know what to do and how to do it? These questions always created an unrest but I always passed them...