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. But the reach of mobiles broke this fundamental user experience of browsing Forums.

Mobile Forums currently thrive on a UX which I like to term “Design Legacy from the Web”. Conversations are still ordered chronologically or by popularity in an endless paginated scroll. Comments are horizontally indented to indicate replies. …

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 Research

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 TalkBack-enabled Android stock keyboard which requires touch exploration to type. We found that on an average BrailleTouch was almost twice as fast as the Android stock keyboard for typing each character. …

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 system?”

or

“What if users create junk?”

better yet,

“What if users upload pornography?”

Initially these questions bothered me. In fact, once we rolled out an ugly “Flag as Inappropriate” way before we had a “Like” button! How crazy is that?!

Now such questions just amuse me! …

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 is a content browser for adventures in your city. We curate activities for our users every weekend, so they can meet more often. Think of Skim as

“A Flipboard for Adventures”

So while Pritesh and I are hacking up our Minimum Loveable Product, I thought it’s about time we cultivate…

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 been playing around with this app for some months now and have been simply delighted by Timehop on more than a few occasions. I’ll try and condense my thoughts in 3 simple reasons.

1. One Thing and One Thing well

It’s almost shocking how a simple idea can delight you immensely every single day! …