Kinder Garten Fogs

A period in my life, i signed up for some lists, just to know how people write things and promote their stuff. Yeah, like everybody does. I AM a alien, but I have to go by the rules of Earth

That was way back, 3 years ago.I kept that account solely for this purpose. As the size of spam grew, I left that email account( Quote: Since its free, why try – By Lazy Bum ), the best and the most professional one, firstname.lastname@gmail.com.

Woah! Some days back I decided to clean that up so that IF i wanted to use that again, I have it pretty and nice.

Now MY main problem is, I CAN’T get out of the mess they created for me. NOT EVEN A SINGLE ONE.

For that individual email, I get around 20 authentic emails a day (according to Gmail because it doesn’t mark them as SPAM). Ofcourse they are not spam mails, but then, I am the MOST IMPORTANT person in their lives. They just spent about half a week copying me to their lists, AWeber, GetResponse, iContact and what not. And fortunately I know about this stuff, but STILL I can’t get out.

I don’t understand. Why somebody will buy your stuff if you don’t respect them? Leave alone the poor quality emails which they send which contain LESS of what I initially wanted and MORE of pitches (Well, they are not going that either way, because they are thinking of getting off your list)

I am preparing a Business card right now, designed by MOO. Its a minicard which says, DON’T PITCH ME, BRO! I hope that I can get this delivered to every one of those list owners.

One of these devils may say, “We’ll keep irritating you TILL you buy something from us”. Their Persuasion is Vexation for me.

The one who are treated badly in this case, are the Newsletter companies, ‘coz most of the people think they are the culprits!

But times are changing now BEWARE spammers!

Not going to close that email account. Will take my time, pick every single ONE of them, tell Newsletter companies about their spam,and will BUST them. Time to take action, and to BLAME the people, NOT the service!!

Tadaa
Mohit Jawanjal

Yeah, Now I DO have some time to code for my own sake

First off, I will enhance the existing plugins, and some include some new ones. There is a surge of Ideas from Hage (Sagar Mehta), which I need to fulfill

Next, I will be posting more of programming and related stuff. So those who wanted some programming tips, GREAT news for you.

And in the end, like always, we will continue talking about usability and other stuff, that may annoy people a lot. But hey! You get freedom of speech since the day you were born, aintcha

Tadaaa,

Mohit

Every single one of us knows the importance of Personalizing your service. NO matter WHAT industry you are in, your clients will always appreciate some efforts taken by you personally to make their life easy. Its not hard to take out 5 minutes and catch up with your clients once in a while. Check if they are satisfied with your product or service, if they need some enhancement in it or they just feel something isn’t quite right with the product. Their opinion matters, and it DOES matter as long as they are using your product.

Its not too hard to get in touch with your clients. Take some time off, and talk them personally on e-mail, chat or phone. If you are too busy to e-mail them personally, ask someone from your team, or setup an autoresponder for them to regularly from a service like AWeber, Imnica (and the list grows…better Google the term “Autoresponder”), so that they can remember you.

Remember, a good software alone CAN’T do wonders, service and support is equally important.

Have a Great Day Ahead.
Mohit Jawanjal

Aaaand we are back again with the rants

Last night I was visiting a website which offered services for autoresponders. Do hell with the statistics and measures of users and the mails which they send, that is by far the most unusable website I have ever seen(No offense for the design community, autoresopnders are one of the most complex implementations according to me.)

What I was experiencing at that time was plain ol’ frustration, a feeling that resembles to a child who is willing to eat a candy, but not able to make his way to the wrapper. The enclosing candy ( or a operation in our so called website) taste sweet after you have done it, and is long lasting, but its just like a candy after all. If you want to eat another one, you will have to open the wrapper once again in order to experience the sweet taste AFTER the bitter taste of frustration.

Why do users have to go in such a pain? Okay! Wrappers are needed to protect things, to organize them up to a certain level, but they can be made in such a way that they can be opened quite easily, candies after candies, no matter how much you eat. Plus it should be consistent all the way. So I am the moron who is explaining usability with a piece of candy, but its true, the comparison fits for me.

My girlfriend sums it up well, when I gave her one of my websites a long time ago:

You know, the designs should be obvious. I look specifically for things, just like I look for things in a grocery store, and the order you put it should be obvious and it should only involve common sense. If it takes some time to figure it out, I may consider myself an idiot for the time being

So, we all know that programmers are Geeks. No trouble with that, and absolutely no offense. But there’s one thing that you should keep in mind, people DO NOT think the way YOU do. They can learn things by Learning and then doing and then learning, but this whole cycle will not be enough as a web user on your website is not there for whole life, or practically, he is not learning how to play golf.

You HAVE to keep it simple. The things in real world involves mostly common sense, and that’s why billions of people are still surviving on earth without being Einstein. On an apple tree grows apples, not oranges (worst possible scenario: Babies hanging on a apple tree ready to be sorted and picked up by Swans to get delivered at your chimneys).

Look closely at your surroundings for simple models. In a grocery store, there’s a huge pile of diapers. Now we know that people will need diapers every week or so. The best way to make them spend less time looking out for things is to keep all baby products at one place, preferably behind the diapers. And the users will think, ‘Aha! That’s the place where baby products are sold’. (Quick tip for Grocery store owners: Put a stand of Beer, slightly away from the baby product. Let the mother take care of the baby and keep something for the lonely, shopping-hating father. And watch your sales rise up. )

Bottom line is that you should concentrate more on common sense, as our users are not wise ET life from another planet, or Einsteins, or Gallelios or Leonardo Da Vinchis. They are common people with common sense and they are in ABUNDANCE. Design things, so that they find it quickly, and crown themselves as intellectuals. A non-techy wife can feel pride and joy by stating, ‘Honey! You know I just set up account in that techy website’. Give them their share of joy and make them feel proud of themselves. If they are happy, they will come back, and they will keep on coming for your candies.

And do remember one thing, if they aren’t able to understandm or they are frustrated, they will leave in the long run, no matter how much features you offer, how attractive your offers are and how you give a GOOD piece of advice with your newsletters along with the purchased products. Nobody on this earth wants to make a fool out of themselves and a incomplete job at the same time.

Mohit

Ever seen sci-fi movies? I bet you have.Have you observed one thing common advanced technologies portrayed since The Terminator to Transformers?

Yep! Its Less Human Intervention. Every single invention, whether it was made or was imagined did the same thing. A century ago, human being paddled a bicycle, now they put their feet on gear and breaks, maybe next decade will have mind-controlled vehicles. Inventions are made for convenience of Human Beings. So was web.

So how are we Programmers concerned about this? Yes we are. Because we all contribute for a user experience. Lets make one thing clear, animation doesn’t make things easy to use every time. User is able to SEE the animation, and is least concerned about it if it is common (Like marquee tag is extinct now, so will be other animation techniques). So what is it that really counts?

Lets make a list to what user does, when interacting to your website:

• Finds content
• Clicks (Hell yeah! The easiest one)
• Puts in information (Maybe his name, Address etc.)
• Search

And so on…

Lets concentrate on the first two, as Search is already taken care by Google. Note that Finding a content is the action of finding something on a particular page, not on the whole website.

Finding a content: Everybody in this world like personalized service.

A little story from my friend: There was a lady in this restaurant to which I went last week. She opened the menu, and helped me with the best drink the restaurent had from a pile of menu items, based on my preferences. And I was very happy, because it saved a lot of time. I hope they do the same thing to their website also. Its very hard to make a online order out of that huge list of menus.

Cool, isn’t it? Now doing that to a website would require efforts, but not too much. Keep a content assist. Let the user register with minimum efforts, and then keep track of his buying habits, his preferences, etc. and offer them the same thing later. And you may get a response like “Holy Shit! How does this webpage know that I wanted to eat Pasta today?”.

Clicks: I’ve been really irritated these days by some particular web pages. They ask me to click so many times to get a simple thing done. All you can do here is reduce the clicks, so that your User’s finger get relaxed atleast while visiting your website. Again, write a simple algorithm to analyze the trend of usage for a particular user, and produce the best possible options for him, so that he can do more with less clicks.

Information: This is probably the most important part. Filling form is a tedious job, and mostly the scariest. I read an analysis of a particular website, from where 70% of anonymous users were scared off by Registration page, because it asked so much information. Why do I have to fill all those things? Maybe I can Login to Facebook by putting my user id and password, and you fetch the information from there. I have already put it there, so why don’t pick it from there only(Name, Email, Sex, even political views and relationship status, if you care).

All I want to say is, provide less inputs to user. Don’t overburden the user with all those inputs, un-find-able menu items and a variety of clicking pattern to get something done. Keep it simple for him, and see the hit goes off the mark for your website. Consult your programmer if you are not one, for this change will really help your users in getting through.

Papa Fog

So this is the new and improved Hello World post! If you are a programmer, I know you are quite familiar with “Hello World!” And if you are not, I am pretty sure internet must’ve taught this to you.

There are some words that WE programmers use, and generally they are out of the reach of non-geeky audience. Like Foo-Bar to show relations. A programmers letters starts with i, j, k rather than a, b, c. (I don’t know who chose this, but he must’ve been a really selfish person: starting everything with I, you know)

Now, this is my Hello World! New, improved and a bit long (not longer than Lorem Ipsum ofcourse). I will write latest hacks, code snippets and my extend-tongue-catch-a-fly philosophy of programming, which I borrowed from my Kinder Garden Frogs. That is because, the solution of a problem isn’t sitting somewhere, waiting for you to find it. And this is very true in case of a computer program. It flies randomly, and the worst part is that we mostly look at the wrong place to find it. And even if we find it, we can’t catch it.

So let me be a frog, and catch those bugs, those which increase my appetite for coding.

I will be coming with a bug soon. Till then, try to catch it on your own

Papa Fog