Sunday, January 19, 2014

Wearables

Read an interesting article about the challenges associated with wearables. I strongly believe that wearables of different types (watches, glasses, bracelets etc) will be key towards the "data driven everything" world that we are marching towards. 

Several opportunities in this space that I can think of
  • Help me with my social interactions. So can my google glass help me by recording names, important nouns in my conversation and provide me context for next time I meet the same person. Helps me get over my "small talk" challenges maybe.
  • Make me more efficient. So can my "watch" or "bracelet" understand that my bp goes up when I talk to person X and try to manage that for me; maybe by making me call X before a party or going to sleep or whatever so that i can recover fast and not waste the entire day after a conversation with X trying to recover.
  • Show the impact on my health. Wearables these days focus on "easy pickings" such as showing me how much i walked, ran etc. But can they then tie to how beneficial these activities are to the blood pressure, sugar levels etc for the person. And warn me when I do not exercise as to the expected impact on my health. I bet such information about positive and negative impact will get lot more people "keeping their promises with regards to exercising".
Here is another interesting article on wearables that I read this weekend.

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

User Experience on Apps


Have been playing around with various applications (apps) on phones. One big issue that I see is this. The app developer needs to ensure that the user can easily understand the model of the app.

For example; in some screens you have the back button and you go back to the previous screen you came from. in other screens there is no back button and the user needs to remember the circuitous route to follow to go back to the previous screen. This makes the user cringe at using the app and this is a debit for the app. To make up for this debit, the app needs to have other credits. Else the utility to the user is not high and the end result if not pretty for the usage of the app.

Of course, I guess one reason why you violate the above principle of "user should know the model" is when you are developing games.