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Some of the participants are trying out a live video stream of the event through their cellphones via Qik. No guarantees on whether or not that will work but here’s the video stream:

This is a guest post by Imran Hussain, Director of IxDC (www.ixdc.org) and a user experience consultant (experiencematters.pk), as part of our post series on world usability day (www.worldusabilityday.org). IxDC recently organized Pakistan’s first usability event called World Usability Day 2008 (www.ixdc.org/events.htm) in Lahore.

This is the second in a series of three posts about usability. In this post, I’ll be looking at some of the skills and components that go into creating a good user experience.

In my first post, I mentioned that most software developers and managers have a very simplistic view of developing software: hire a bunch of coders for programming the backend and grab a graphic designer to design the frontend of an application. The problem with this approach is that both types of professionals usually lack user focus and requisite skills for designing interfaces.

Developing high quality, usable interfaces requires a multidisciplinary approach and a variety of design skills - this is especially true of web and mobile applications which are multifaceted in nature and are usually a combination of features, information, and other media content. There is a great conceptual model called ‘The Elements of User Experience’ <http://www.jjg.net/elements/> which illustrates some of these essential components and skills:

Read the rest …

Bookmark this post because we will be liveblogging the Usability event at NUST on Tuesday.

I’m not sure how the wifi will hold up at the event hall - but if its there check back here for live coverage of the discussions thanks to bloggers from the community of readers who have volunteered to cover it

I’d also encourage bloggers to tweet about it or blog about it on your own blogs too - thanks and see you all there!

Mohtashim discovered that Orgoo’s website was down. On further inquiry turns out that the email and video-chat service has been down for over a month now. The only explanation on the net about this is the following email from their CEO:

Hi,
We’ve received a large number of emails from our users asking when Orgoo will be back online. I apologize that we have been down as long as we have, and that it has taken so long to let you know why.

The issue is that someone used Orgoo’s video chat to allegedly display illegal content. While an intermediary such as Orgoo is not liable for user-generated content, the company that hosts our service has decided to take Orgoo down and is refusing to release our data. Their actions are egregious and we are aggressively doing what we can to force the return of our data so we can put Orgoo back online as soon as possible.

Please send me with your Orgoo email address so we can match it with your alternative email address. Once Orgoo is back online I will be sending an email notifying all account holders. We value our users and hope that you continue to support Orgoo.
We deeply regret the inconvenience.

Sincerely,

Michael Kantor
CEO
Orgoo, Inc

That email was sent about a month ago when the site had been down for a week or two.

There’s a lot of interesting questions this raises - as Michael says, Orgoo is an intermediary service between two end-users and thus cannot be liable for its users’ actions, but what I dont fully understand is why the ISP or hosting partner is making a decision in the matter. What’s worse, why are they not releasing orgoo’s data back to them…. they should have the right to get hte data sans the offensive / illegal part, and put in greater content filters before re-releasing their service. Somehow I get the feeling this isnt the full picture here.

After initially sympathizing with Orgoo though, I wonder what - if anything - they can do in the future to avoid these problems. How far does an email service go to monitor user activity that doesnt violate user privacy but yet allows for regulation of illegal activity or activity that could a threat to national security as an example.

What’s more, its been over a month now that the service has been down - I cant imagine what deadlock exists with their hosting partner that cannot or hasnt been resolved in a few meetings.

And why didnt Orgoo have any local backups on their hard-drives that they could boot up on another host? Say the service went down today - couldn’t I load up last nights backup in another email, and ask users to tolerate one day’s lost data for a while? Didnt they have any backups at all, considering an ISP shutting them down has effectively shut down their whole business?

Like I said, there seems to be more to this story than is evident here. It would be good to have anyone with more info share it with the readers here.

The day after thanksgiving is one of the best days to land a good deal on something you’ve been waiting to buy, and its taken the role of much of a ritual every year… with thousands of shoppers lining up at 3am at stores to rush in and grab the best deals while there’re still items left.

But its been beginning to go a bit far in recent years - this year there’s already two sad reports coming through - a walmart employee crushed by people rushing into the store, and elsewhere 2 people shot dead at a ToysRUs store over an argument seemingly over a video game console.

According to The New York Times, the mob that gathered outside the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y. rushed the store’s main entrance at 4:55 a.m., knocking the glass doors off their tracks and shattering them. Store employee Jdimytai Damour was knocked to the ground and run over by the mass of shoppers who were later forced to leave the store by police.

Damour, 34, was given emergency treatment at the scene, but pronounced dead at nearby Franklin Hospital Medical Center. Police were in the process of reviewing the store’s security tapes and attempting to identify the individuals involved.

In these parts, while greed for shopping may not cause things like this, the overall air of frustrations are disturbing.

Having observed how commenters on this blog have been evolving over the past two years, pretty much since the Emergency was declared about a year ago there’s been an overwhelming wave of negativity sweeping online environments. A lot of people tell me its just people venting their frustrations at life online, but recently its been getting increasingly violent in their verbiage.

Soemtiems, it almost seems like there are those out there who look at communities like GnW or otherwise people who are seemingly "ok" in current times as a serious threat, that every positive step must be negated and every opportunity must be used to undermine the people trying to run it.

Here’s hoping society wakes up one day with a piece of its sanity back.

The usability-focus event on Tuesday is getting a little more interest. Dr. Shuaib Karim has now joined the panelists - he is an assistant professor in Quaid-e-Azam university and has done his PhD in Web Accessibility. He is also been involved in W3C’s working group on accessibility evaluation and reporting.

Should be an interesting discussion.

Anyone out there willing to liveblog the event for us?

We’ve been lazy at times for fixing the things people ask us to fix related to the gnw theme or featureset etc. But a good way to keep reminding ourselves that the readers want certain features or types of stories would be through direct feedback.

I’ve just setup a uservoice page for Green & White now so you can directly leave about things, anonymously or via a user account. Just click the feedback widget to the left or go to http://gnw.uservoice.com

One of the top TOP requests has always been to remove the huge list of tags from the right. Its done - I’ve just made it a tag cloud now.

For some reason I have a soft spot for websites that are written in informal, conversational copy. Hosting sites have always shied one step away from being informal - maybe it comes from a desire to be considered ‘reliable’ or ’serious’ about their work. But as such its also somehow difficult to navigate their sites.

This* web hosting was a refreshing in how their pages have really good informal copy and really clean web-design. That doesnt say anything about what type of host they are, and the advanced people out there may come back and say that their informal writing is actually hiding the detailed technical facts about their service, but maybe thats the point…. maybe their target market is just someone how needs to feel secure about their host without caring about technical details.

Check it out.

"Usability - Why should you care?" is the theme of a unique, interactive event similar to the Startup Insiders ones of old that Zigron and Green & White are holding at NUST this Tuesday, Dec 2, 2008 from 5pm to 8pm.

The importance of having user experience design skills are being felt by companies in the entire industry today as they see the world evolve and explode into an abundance of software systems.

A couple of decades ago when software was just an emerging concept - the focus of what made successful software was functionality or features. That was because, when any product-industry is seeing economics of scarcity, the product with the most features for the same price wins. Think about, e.g., the mp3-players from back in 2000 when the term "digital audio player" or didnt really exist.

But as each industry becomes more established, it hits a threshold of abundance - an area where the core features required to create a product become too easy to create or replicate. In such cases, user experience is one of the things that start to differentiate one product from another. Again, the ipod or iphone becomes a classic example here.

There are a number of IT companies within Islamabad who are already transitioning their processes and teams into a usability-focused disciplines, whose products are valued and heralded because of their attention to HCI, and whose teams must be a deep mix of fantastic engineers who also happen to have great aesthetic taste.

The problem is, that these companies arent really doing a good enough job of answer your questions or thoughts about usability.

So we’ve decided to bring all these companies from Islamabad into one room in front of you so you can ask the tough questions that you need answered to better understand the importance of usability. Here’s the panelists who’ll be there to answer your questions:

• Haris Khan, CEO, Zigron, makers of daremycompany.com and pingmycompany.com - their firm differentiates their services on usability
• Osama A. Hashmi, CEO, CDF Software and founder of Green&White - their product has been largely lauded for its uniquely usable way of solving an age-old problem
• Babar Khan - Country Manager, iKonami - ikonami’s flagship product "AT-Work" is the worlds largest single SAAS installation at the worlds fourth largest employer, and the company promotes the idea of "Common Sense Usability"
• Kubair Shirazee, CEO, iKonami
• Atif Mumtaz, co-founder, or Faisal Chohan, CEO Brightspyre - their products were accepted by the biggest blogs in the world and praised for their simplicity of use in comparison to competitors.
• Faizan Buzdar, CEO, Scrybe - Look at this - enough said.
• Murad Akhtar, CEO, TinTash - their company focuses on casual game development
• Dr. Khalid Latif, Assistant Professor, NUST - His PhD and research focus is on semantic web and focuses on usability within his advanced courses at NUST.

This interactive session will be of a similar format to the "Startup Insiders" event series we started of old… but it will be followed-on by the showing of an interesting film "Helvetica" which showcases the importance of design in business.

The event is free to attend, but you’ll have to register at Facebook or here.

See you there!

Shipito.com caught my attention via a facebook ad, and they seem to be a promising service as long as I can get more people to confirm they’ve used it and recommend it. Their premise is simple.

A lot of US retailers abroad do not ship products internationally, leaving the people outside to look for local resellers for those products. The problem is that most popular products are resold at 30-50% premium locally, making it even more inaccessible to purchase.

Shipito.com will let you buy products from US Retailers and have them ship it to their warehouse in California. From there, shipito will ship you the product in whatever country you’re in, using "Super low USPS and FedEx rates" - specifically at $8.50 / package or $50 / year.

The premise of the business sounds interesting, but I wouldnt use it unless I know someone else who has and who can recommend the service… and unfortunately the site doesnt have too many testimonials from known customers. I think the pricing can be achieved - since they’re storing all products first they would be able to do large bulk shipments and save from there. But I still need to know they’re the real thing and what people have said about their customer service before trying it out myself.