ashishlive!

I am no usability expert, nor a PhD in HCI. I am just another tech savvy, maybe a more concerned one. This post is a rant against two most popular and religiously used applications: Youtube and Outlook. I am so frustrated of the usability bugs in these applications, that i am writing this post hoping to get some relief and a fix from these bugs soon. Youtube: Smart Resolution Present your user with minimal number of options and make decisions for them wherever possible. This seems like a magic usability-voodoo that works most of the times, but sadly not for Youtube. It goes something like this for Youtube: I click on a video, and it opens up nice with a 360px resolution (atleast with my browser and connection). I am watching this 1 hour video which has almost buffered completely and i decide to go full screen. Whoa! Youtube decides for you that the video resolution must be changed to 480px or more for a better video experience. I loose all my buffered video, and at times when my intern...

So i was mailing somebody at facebook @facebook.com and got the following autoreply mail from Facebook: Sub: Please use @fb.com for Facebook Corporate email Dear Sender: Facebook has changed its corporate email address domain from @ facebook.com to @ fb.com . Your message has been delivered to the intended recipient, but please update your contact details with @ fb.com for future correspondence. You will not receive this message again if you utilize @ fb.com . We will not be forwarding any email sent to @ facebook.com corporate email addresses past January 5th, 2011. Regards, Facebook I was hoping to get @facebook.com much earlier, like by Christmas or something. Sad.

Puzzle: Poisoned Wine You have 240 barrels of wine, one of which has been poisoned. After drinking the poisoned wine, one dies within 24 hours. You have 5 slaves whom you are willing to sacrifice in order to determine which barrel contains the poisoned wine. How do you achieve this in 48 hours? (Please try the puzzle before you skip to the solution mentioned at the bottom of this page.) Solution: We are gonna play with number bases this time. Hope you are familiar with them, or else you will not understand a bit after this sentence (Apologies. Thanks.). So, we have 5 slaves. Lets just forget about number of barrels and also assume that we have only 1 day. One day and five slaves, thats it. Can we determine how many barrels can we solve with our new constraints? Yes, we can. Lets see how: Five slaves and one chance. They must drink in a fashion that covers all the barrels and drink in a unique way i.e each barrel must be drank by a unique set of slaves, so that when some slaves die, ...

Everyone knows how iPod/iPhone revolutionized the user experiences of handheld devices. Its a device more usable than anything before of its kind Lets hold our thoughts here, think for sometime and figure out the awesomeness behind this great user-experience. The two very basic points their UI revolved around were: 1. Make the Action-Points in the UI easily reachable. Since iPod was a touchscreen device, they used big sized buttons to achieve this, and a highly calibrated keyboard made typing a smoothie. Those big buttons really made accessing those action points easily. You never feel like using a stylus with iPod/iPhone, thats ease of access. 2. Minimal Scrolling: Use multiple screens instead of one big list, go deeper levels or flip that screen but stay on a single page. iPod had reasonably categorized menus at as many places as possible and the very intuitive "back" buttons sure showed the way out to the main application. If you look closely at one of those apps you love ...

Dear Facebook, I have noticed that clicking on the "Top News" link changes the top news everytime. The top news doesn't seems like top news anymore. I understand you might be looking forward to engaging more users by doing so, but it is pissing off many of us. You being the big daddy of the social network, we expect a stable and sensible browsing experience from you. Regards, FB User!

I attempt and dare to solve the problem of password-stealing which occur primarily due to Social Engineering Hacks. Also, this adds another layer of protection over passwords and make passwords more secure and usable! The method exploits the fact that given a word to type, different people will type the word in different fashions. The speed of typing will be different and the typing-accent will vary. We now attach this typing-accent attribute to the password and make them more secure i.e. even if you tell your password to a third-person, he wont be able to authenticate himself as you. Also, this improves the usability of passwords. As pointed by Jakob Nielsen, un-masking the password would provide better usability. Passwords can now be unmasked as this method tries to cover for the social engineering hacks which are the clear threats to unmasking passwords. As a proof of concept, i provide a demo here . The demo is Javascript based, where you can set your password and then attempt to e...

Well, i accept it. I tried everything available on Google and nothing seems to work for me to control my Lenovo laptop's screen's brightness. So i wrote a little script to get my work done. .setbright.sh: #!/bin/sh if [ $# -ne 1 ] then echo "Usage: bright 50" exit fi x=$((($1*254)/100)) n=$(echo "ibase=10;obase=16;$x" | bc) sudo setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B="$n" #End of setbright.sh Then modfied my .bashrc as: alias bright=$HOME/.setbright.sh bright 50 #Set Brightness to 50% Now use on command line as: bright 60 Am happy as of now with this!!