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Paper on Digital Identity

A paper I had written was selected for publication by USID 2007, HCI Hyderabad.
Without much ado, here is the file:
Digital Identity

Walls on fire

From the ancient times human have been trying to enliven their surroundings. The following images show one of the oldest discovered images made by man. Humans are one of the few animals, who have a sense of aesthetics. Well many nests made by birds, or mud castles made by termites, etc. are beautiful too, but more than beauty they are primarily functional. Humans are I guess the only ones who make art just for the sake of it.

“The eruption of Vesuvius preserved graffiti carved on the walls of Pompeii, including everyday Latin insults, magic, love declarations, alphabets, political consigns, and quotations from famous literature, offering us a direct insight into ancient Roman street life.” This line, a quote from wikipedia on graffiti, gives a very apt summary of ancient street art.

Fast forward to twenty years ago. The new age graffiti appeared on the urban lanscape. Intertwined with Hip-Hop and punk music, it was illegal and so very cool. They were considered vandals and chased by the police.

In 1986 Frank Shepard Fairey  started a street art campaign called ‘André the Giant has a Posse‘ as an experiment in phenomenology. Propagated by skaters, they now have full firm called obeygiant, selling everything stickers, clothing and music. Their tagline is ‘Manufacturing quality dissent since 1989′.

Banksy on the Israel west bank wall, earned wordlwide media attention.From piss stinking walls it has sneaked into the exhibition gallery.  Banksy who was one of the pioneers of the stencil art, now has exhibitions with a live elephant painted with gilt. He sells his prints for thousands of dollars. Street art has even been covered by the time magazine.

And this street art culture has been widespread, running through many countries. Recently I read an article on the first generation street art in Iran. I had always felt why I did’nt see any in India. I have been in Mumbai and now in Delhi, but apart from the trivail and egoistic, ‘i love u rita/sita/anita’ scratched on walls I didn’t see any. So it felt really good when I spotted a few in Delhi on my way to office. One is that of a grinning face with a sort of cross for his face. This has been stencilled along the outer ring road, on the sides of flyovers and bus stop signals.  This image was taken at the Hauz-khas/IIT flyover.

With decrease in printing costs, new media like stickers and pasteups have arrived. People are experimenting even with cut metal. While it is debatable if what these artists are doing is right or not, as they sometimes do paint on private property. But it cannot be dismissed that they do make our surroundings beatiful. Here is a slideshow with some pics of prominent street arts.

So people stencil the city, but do it right.

How Many you Have ? (Active chat windows)

Google has blurred the thin line between messaging applications and web messaging application. So it’s no wonder that I do most of my unplanned chats on Gmail. Once I was talking to 4 of my friends at a time in my Gmail chat pop-ups. If you look at the screen the first chat pop-up opens from the right corner. My screen was full and now one more friend comes online. But when i tired to open a new chat window the first one disappeared. I again opened the 1st one window by clicking on the list of people and now second friend window disappeared. In short the least active window will disappear. It took me a moment to realize that only four windows could be open at once on my PC. I tried this thing with wide screen laptop and it supported five active windows. So it must be dependent upon the width of the screen. And after a limit it starts disappearing.

If the disappeared fellow messages you than his window appears and the least active disappear. Assume a case that you talking to 10 people at a time than probably you will see an animation of windows coming and going and you will not be able to write .

Where do those windows go actually? Can’t the previous windows remain minimized when I open more and more. One design solution could be minimizing and stacking those previous windows. When the person messages you it could change its color to orange as it does in active chat window. All information will be visible to me at the same time. I will be more in control when system will keep me informed.

Ticket Please…

I travel in 4 to 6 different buses a day. Mostly for work, as fun travel is reserved for the autorickshaw. And it has been 3 months since i have been in delhi. So I have travelled a lot in delhi buses. Most of the travel is made interesting by interesting people and the tape/radio. From haryanvi folk songs to Black Eyed Peas from the radio, there is always something for everyone.

And the bus tickets. It’s the tickets which made me think of how the whole system is designed. And most of the times I travel by private buses not by DTC(govt buses), simply because they are what I mostly get.Though I have travelled in many different buses, along different routes, I keep getting the same tickets again and again. And only a very few have the bus registration number printed on it. The first thing which seemed most probable was each ticket meant a bus operator. But then I found three different types of tickets on the same conductor. Also seen on bus insides is a painted sign, “Ticketless travel is like, begging”, or “Ticketless travel would be punished by a fine of Rs. 100″. So the first question which came to mind was, how do the conductors prevent people from traveling on old tickets. When I examined the tickets, I noticed the 4 digit number on each ticket. That figured, as the conductors can keep track of what numbers (and what design) they have sold in a day. And if someone claims to have taken the ticket, showing them an old one, they can check the ticket number and check.

The number on the ticket does solve one problem, of preventing people from getting a free ride. But there are still some problems left. When the conductors run out of a particular denomination of ticket, say of Rs.2, they tear the Rs. 5 ticket through its middle, making a hole in it. A Rs. 5 ticket with a hole in it is Rs. 2. So this implies that they don’t have to give an account of where each ticket went to the owner. So how does the bus owner, who most probably has 10s of buses, keep check on his conductors and prevent them from cheating him.

From what I have seen and I have seen a lot of tickets, all of them have only a 4 digit number. That means for each design of ticket there are 9999 unique ones out there. But the designs are so few and the people who travel on buses so large, that I am sure that there are multiple lots of a single design with 0 - 9999 printed on them. So if the conductor wants he can easily get the same design and series of tickets from the market. Here I am assuming that they don’t print 5 or more digit numbers. One because to print each number means additional complexity, with less marginal returns. And two because I don’t think the bus owners do a lot of accounting, i.e. No. of tickets == X Rs.

From what I know of delhi buses, I guess their owners use mafia techniques to keep them in check. First time caught stealing, a thumb, second time a foot, third time into the Yamuna…

Also a problem which I personally face is of fending conductors who have weak memory, who ask me to take ticket a moment after I have bought one. One of my friends suggests asking him,”hey first give me my change, I just gave you a Rs .100 note.” HA haa..that would test their memory for sure.

What I have done in this post is inspired by Newton’s thought experiments. The simplest way of finding how all this works is, just asking some conductors and bus drivers. But that would take away all the charm of reasoning out of it. I want this to remain a semi-mystery like the ‘BeanBag‘ signs painted across mumbai. People do have some wild theories about it.

If you have any different idea or find any flaws do point them out.
Also points to ponder while you get bored in your (office)/(college)/(wherever else you get bored), over these:Are Akaash and Pakash(a word with no meaning for all I know) printed by the same printer? If so why? Did he get bored with one design? Did he loose a font. Or by workers of one printer who stole the printing molds and slightly changed it to prevent copyright violation?

Browser War - 1

99% chances are that you are reading this on a browser. So being a usability/design blog why not analyze your browser first. For starters let’s just focus on very basic browsing goals, in three web browsers mainly IE7, Firefox 2 and Opera 9. And we won’t be going into how these browsers render html code or how margins behave differently in IE and other browsers. Because the users do not care; all they want is a browser which lets them do things they want. And they won’t change their browser if a margin goes a little here or there. Wo what we will do is analyze how these browsers respond to normal basic browsing.

What is normal basic browsing? Opening new windows, new tabs, typing in a URL etc. We will go task wise and try to accomplish each task in each browser.

strong>Task: Opening a New window from file menu by either File> New Window or by the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + N. Then typing in the URL and pressing enter using the keyboard.

IE: It duplicates the existing page instead of opening a fresh new window. In some cases it might be useful but in most of the cases it is completely useless. Now if the user presses the stop button or presses the ‘Esc’ then the page loading stops. Let’s assume the user does not stop the loading page, instead clicks with the mouse on the address bar. While clicking on the address bar s/he is looking at the monitor. After
bringing the cursor into the address bar, the user looks down at least once towards the keyboard and begins typing. Meanwhile during this time what many times happens is that the duplicate page has loaded and the browser puts that URL into the address bar. The user’s click has gone waste.
There are two problems here:
a) The browser opens a duplicate page when ordered to open a new window.
b) Once the user clicks any editable textbox, s/he should be its master. But here the browser usurps control.
Opera: Opera has got it exactly right. It opens a fresh new window with cursor blinking on the address bar. The behavior when starting opera, and when opening a new page are totally different and as expected. A new page is a new page. And users can set what they want when starting opera, homepage, or last open page, etc.
Firefox: It opens a blank page when a new page is opened, as it should. This takes it’s value from the Tools>Options>Main>Startup. The options here are blank page, homepage or last session. When either blank page or last session is selected, it opens a blank page when we do Ctrl + N or File>New Window. But if the homepage is selected it starts opening the homepage in every new window. Architecturally the problem here is that the browser behaves in the same way when it starts as well as when a new window is opened.Here we have to look into the benefits of setting a homepage. One would set the homepage as something which s/he wants to see the first time s/he opens a browser. It maybe an email site, a news site or whatever. But once he has opened the browser, the homepage is loaded. And the marginal utility of the homepage loaded on any new window is considerably lower.

Here too the problem with the browser loading the URL over a clicked address bar is present.
Task: Opening a page by pasting a URL into the address bar.

IE and Firefox: Behave similarly and as expected.

Opera: We copy the URL from somewhere and paste it in the address bar. To start page loading we would need one thing, the ‘Go’ button. But where is it? Opera has added a feature, when right clicked in the address bar; it has an additional option, ‘Paste and Go’. Though this is very useful as it eliminates a click, removing a very basic button, just because you have a new feature does not make sense.

Task: Opening a new tab window by either File> New Tab or keyboard shortcut Ctrl + T

There are multiple ways of opening a new tab in each of these browsers.
IE: a) File>New Tab along with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl +T. They have put this option above the New Window option. Guess they want to propagate tab navigation.
b) Click on the rectangle, which gives a new page icon on hover. Which I guess is a little less discoverable. The easy thing could have been to put in the icon by default and on hover a text box saying ‘New Tab’.
c) Clicking on the tab bar, in the vacant space opens a new tab. The problem with this is when the number of tabs increase to 4-5 the tab bar is fully covered. And there is no vacant space. So this feature is only useful when the tabs are less than 4-3 (in different monitor resolutions). The workaround IE has done is, even when the number of tabs increases the rectangle still remains and remains to the right of the tabs, where new tabs should come. So the users flow is maintained.

Opera: a) File> New Tab along with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl +T. Here also it is above the new window. No surprise because these are the people who started tabs.
b) On the left of the tabs is the button for the ‘New Tab’. It has both text and the icon which makes it quite intuitive. But the utility of this button is a little suspect because of its positioning. Also it is too near the File>New Tab.
c) Here also you can click on the vacant area on the Tab bar and open new tabs. But as soon as this space is taken by the new tabs the user has to go back towards left to the ‘New Tab’ button. This totally breaks the flow. They could have easily put the button to the right of the open tabs, like IE7 which would solve this problem.

Firefox: a)File> New Tab along with keyboard shortcut Ctrl + T. But it goes below the Ctrl + N option. I can’t understand why.
b)It does not have the tab bar by default. Only if you open the first tab in a window does the tab bar come. This hugely reduces discoverablity. People who may not know about tabs, may never come to know of it. Also there is not default button for new tab. User’s can customize and add it. Now how many people do actually customize?
c)Here also you can open a new tab by clicking on the vacant are on the tab bar. Again the same problem of having no vacant area as soon as 4-5 tabs are open.
The rest of this post will be posted in a few days. It will include rest of the ways of opening a page, i.e clicking on a link, right clicking etc..

About

A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. - Douglas Adams

The customary quote out of the way, KicksandKisses is a Design and Usability Blog started by Gajendra Agrawal and K.A Anand. It would mainly deal with user experience of systems. But that said it may have anything depending upon the whims and fancies of it’s creators.

The purpose of the Blog is to make users aware about Usability issues of a product or a system. At the same time helping them to make a usable product choice. This Blog will also be useful for engineers and designers to take feedback about design and usability to further improve upon their innovation.

p.s. Feel free to thrash both of them if you see errors in reasoning :).

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Gajendra Agrawal is a User Interface Designer. After graduating from , IIT Guwahati in Design, he worked with one of India’s major telecom providers. Currently he is working with a leading software product company in India.
Gajendra’s professional interests include social computing and information visualization and writing design reviews. Apart from design, he enjoys travelling and socializing.
He can be reached at gajendra.agrawal [at]gmail.com

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K.A.Anand or kaa is an Interface developer. After graduating from IIT Bombay in Metallurgical Engineering and Material Science he moved onto more interesting things. He worked for a year in mumbai for a leading animation/design studio and designed for bollywood films. Then he freelanced for a year providing consultancy and services for corporate clients in fields ranging from e-learning and business enterprise management. He is now part of the team designing and developing SlideShare. In his spare time he likes to sleep under the sky and watch clouds go by. He can be reached at k.a.anand [at]gmail.com.