Starting over 2020

Its the end of 2020, a momentous year that made us a part of history. Where a tiny crown-like virus brought entire countries, entire economies to a stand still. A year that changed how we work, play, live and love for ever. It is with anticipation, and a little dread, a little hope that we await the new decade. With the hope that 2021 sees the world resuming to just a little bit more normalcy, a little bit more human connection after the social isolation of the last none months.

It is with this hope and anticipation that I start a new chapter in my blog life. What started in 2006 as sporadic articles, loose thoughts and impulsive posts. Life happened, and here I am in 2020, starting over.

Starting over with what I now know are two things inextricably linked to experiences. Food and design. One inspire the other. The meta structures of one are ideas for the other.

In this phase 2, I write about design, food and everything in between.

Wishing you and yours a safe, healthy and happy 2021. In gratitude.

Bigflix.com – bad bad bad usability

“Finally Netflix has come to India!”, friends gushed as they told me about Bigflix, a Netflix like service for India. On checking their website, it seemed even better than Netflix, what with the free drop and pickup; and a bigflix store located across the street. The site seemed to be having some hiccups though. Clicking categories like 100-must see movies led to a ‘No results found’ page. I dismissed that as teething problems, and soon enough, those problems did disappear. Only to be replaced by major usability issues

First, the website itself. Looks like the last person on the minds of the designer was the actual end-user. The single most important action on the site (apart from actual selection of movies) is the ‘send pickup request’ button. This should have been a piece of cake, but no. It is embedded in a fancy Javascript layer, which takes forever to load. And to make it worse, it is available on a single place on a single page! Talk about easy accessibility!

The pages have a major performance issue, atleast 10 seconds are required to move a movie one level up. Talk about moving it five to six levels around.

The categorization is bad, browsing alphabetically will show movie titles in all possible languages. The navigation is rigid, you either browse using predefined categories or alphabetically.

Now coming to the logistics part – there is absolutely no communication between the BigFlix stores, and the call-center. They behave like two seperate entities. The call center guys will not pick up movies that the customer picked up from the physical store!

The service does not suit well for professionals working late. The Bigflix guy will come to your place at a time convenient to HIM, and if you are not home, will take that movie off your list!

At the time of writing this, my account is showing 2  movies lying with me, one of them has infact never been delivered to me at all!

All in all, these guys have a strong movie collection,  money and infrastructure. But they need to evolve to an acceptable level of service and integration, before they can compare to a ‘customer friendly’ trendsetter like netflix. My money is stuck for the next 6 months, but a word of caution before you jump on to the bandwagon!

The Refrigerator Hunt

Ive been shopping around for a new fridge since the last two months. I needed a roomier model large enough to stash away unused grocery while I am away from home a month or two. A lot of my kitchenware has handles, and it was getting difficult to refrigerate these pots and pans with leftovers.

I had heard about the new design with the freezer at the bottom, that minimises the need to bend, every time you want tomatoes from the veggie tray – so I decided to give it a try.

The lone model that met these needs was Hitachi. The fridge is on top, and the veggie tray and freezer are drawer-like compartments. Quite a novel concept – except, the drawers have a great storage space – much more than necessary. On the contrary, the refrigeration section was a little smaller than my current 225L .

All the other models in the 400L – 425L category were the standard 2 door variety – in white or metallic gray. Whirlpool had a little bit of glitter on the door handle, bit other than that, the models hardly had any aesthetic differentiation.

For years, research has been telling us, not to store eggs on the door-side shelf. But modern refrigerator design seems to be extremely conservative in that sense, with the egg container firmly placed on the top shelf on the door-side. Samsung was the only one which actually had a free container that can be placed any where.

So finally, it was the Samsung that came home. An LG or whirlpool wouldnt have been too different either, Whilpools’s green tinted interiors retro interiors put me off. As for LG, Ive had a bad experience with their servicing for my home theatre – and Ive vowed never to buy any LG product again!

A lot of scope out there for designing refrigerators. I hope some product designers are listening!

The ‘other’ door

Out to lunch last weekend, we stopped by a restaurant in Manhattan. The sign that hung on the front doors – you know a pair of doors that opens in the middle- pointed towards the right and said ‘Use other door’. We walked all the way round the building and came back to the same door, there was no other door to enter.

Finally, we figured that they meant, use the other half from the ‘same pair’ of doors. You see, one in the pair was  being cleaned!

But it was such an overkill of instruction, since that was the most obvious thing to do if we hadn’t seen that sigh in the first place

Blogs, Lawsuits & Privacy

Blogs, by their very nature, make the private-public. You share your innermost thoughts and feelings here, without presumptions, the way you would record these us an journal. Voyuerism, when people consume your thoughts as idle reading – and you want them to do it too. I wonder, how honest are people when tyhey actually write in these spaces. In India, the twos As, Aamir and Amitabh, now have their blogs. The two superstars may have revived the word for the public – but earlier Shekahr Kapur and Anurag Kashyap have long been favorite stopping posts of avid movie goers.

Shekhar does not blog much nowadays, most of Anurag’s posts are about the upcoming film Aamir. Aamir, the person, has an endearing quality to his blogs – I suspect he very much writes the way he talks, and once in a while, there’s an occasional typo, not too different from an email he would have personally written.

Amitabh, on the contrary, seems to proofread his writing quite a bit, and even posts an apology for the ocassionally mis spelt word. Hmm…is this a man or a copywriting team at work…a lot of people wonder. But its fun reading what is presented as the individual writing in first person, just to know what the rich and famous think of 🙂

Closer home – J is blogging now. The comments section warns employees to post ‘relevant’ comments and further cautions that comments will be filtered. Hmm, Im sure they would do it anyway, but putting it up there seems to be a tad unnecessary, and demaeaning even.

‘download plugin’ deadend

I am stuck with the company laptop on which I have no admin rights, and…no flash player!!

This, however, has given me a very good experience of the general site accessibility. Most of the sites simply dont function without flash these days. I cant view the birthday invitation my cousin sent on 123greetings.com, cant play scrabble on facebook, cant surf slideshare or youtube. Well, so its back to consuming content the old fashioned way – and i am accessing only about 50% internet 😦

Currently reading…

Jon Kolko’s essays on Interaction Design

I bought it about a year back and am pretty surprised to see it classified as a rare book. There’s only one used copy on Amazon retailing at $105, about three times the price I paid for this a year back.

Nevertheless – good read.

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