Gopal's blog

How do you see cloud? ‘white puffy ‘ or ‘dark gray’

gvaswani — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:23:09 +0000

Interesting debate underway on economist.

http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/157?source=most_commented

Slow ubuntu can help visualize system behavior

gvaswani — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:35:19 +0000

Integrating Six sigma and design thinking

gvaswani — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:48:05 +0000

I read an interesting article on NY times about how Design thinking and Six Sigma approaches can coexist in symbiotic nature. The author Sara Bekam who is also the director of Management of Technology Program at UC Berkeley compares Design thinkers to quantum physicists, who are able to consider a world in which anything — like traveling at the speed of light — is theoretically possible. The Six sigma advocates, she says, think more like Newtonian physicists — focused on measurement along three well-defined dimensions.

While working as a designer in User Centered Design team at Honeywell, I was responsible for bringing in design thinking to new product development and apply design methods to improve user experience of the Honeywell products. But Honeywell’s strong emphasis on Six Sigma process meant that, I had to be proficient in Six Sigma process and tools. We were required to be green belt certified within 3 years in the company (yes I am GB certified).

As a designer I initially was resistant to this process, but after following it for some projects, I quickly realized that it was an important tool to keep you focused on the users and business needs. Some of the tools like Quality function diagram really help you to justify the business value of your intended product features. It is important as a designer to wear two hats and know when to wear one. In the initial phase of the product development, too much emphasis on sixsigma process can limit creativity and free-flowing brainstorming sessions. Yes six sigma has tools like Tmap (thought process map) for the initial idea generation phase, but they are very rigid and aren’t really useful (may be because sixsigma is more apt for process improvement/optimization).

It is here one can rely on design thinking to give you novel ideas and feed them into sig sigma process chain.

Tim brown also agrees with me

Additional markups for structured data

gvaswani — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:06:32 +0000

While reading a blog post on Google webmaster blog I chanced upon the concept of microformats and RDFa which are openstandards to markup your content. Each of them provides a set of XHTML attributes to augment visual data with machine-readable hints.

Google has nice overview of both microformat and RDFa for the uninitiated.

Google webmaster recommended to use these formats for marking-up your structured content as it allows google to show your content in rich snippets. Obviously if your entry on Google search results page has more rich information, the users are more likely to click on it. And you earn more money, fame and traffic.

I wonder if there is a web browser plugin to parse this markup data and reveal more information about the content than just visually rendering it. For example, every time it identifies a ‘people’ tag it can ask us to add to our contact or give additional details (in a hypothetical side bar) about the places tagged in the page. And then we can also have more real scenarios than I have mentioned here.

I will trying using these standards to markup all politicians and constituency (in India) information in my envisioned Indian election application.

The begining

gvaswani — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:59:53 +0000

The blogging bluff starts now..