And I believe we can fix it — Forums have been in existence since the dawn of the internet era. People have always loved engaging in intellectual (or mostly non intellectual) banter on forums for decades. They’ve served us well all these years as simple websites with messages chronologically piled one below the other endlessly. …

A project with the Ahmedabad City Municipal Corporation in a Zero-Litter City campaign — In 2013, we were approached by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation to help design a unique bin to help with their “Zero-Litter City” campaign. Here is a story of how we figured out the problems and designed a solution which was selected as the best designed bin in the challenge. The…

Objective Comparisons between Gesture and Exploration Based Touchscreen Keyboards for the Blind — This paper was first published in the Asia Pacific CHI of 2013. Here is a link. Abstract We report the results of a short term experimental study on blind participants to evaluate their performances on two different typing techniques. BrailleTouch, a gesture based text typing technology, is objectively compared to the…

Lessons for Product Owners and Interaction Designers — Design never fails to present interesting aspects of human thinking to me each day. Especially, how we as engineers and geeks think about our users. Quite often I’ve had my developers pose the following questions to me when I’m pushing hard for a new feature. “What if users game the…

Building an early-user mob for Skim while being cheap!  — Some Background I’ve always been a man with many hats. Hacker, Hipster, Hustler — I’ve done it all. The following is the story of how I’m trying to validate an exciting idea I came up with my partner in crime — Pritesh. It’s called ‘Skim’. Caution — Shameless plug ahead! ☺ Skim…

Timehop — The time capsule in my pocket. — timehop Timehop is a visual memory app, which brings together pieces of memories that you may have created over many years on various social channels on that very day! They have a really interesting startup story as an email-first product covered nicely by Ryan Hoover on his blog. I have…