Life - 4

Life is like a place where you won't get lost no matter which path you walk, but you might if you stay put.

(Originally tweeted a few months ago.)

Writing

You don't write to advocate your ideas; you write to outgrow them.

I'm learning UX

One of the qualities of good user experience (UX) is that people don't notice good UX.  They'd find the product good, but if you ask them why they like a product, they can't tell you.  Because they don't know.  They don't know because they don't care.  Most people don't care how a product works[*], but they care about what they can do with it.

I wrote a simple program that lets my friend Nags post pictures to her photo blog.  Yesterday I made two tiny little changes to the UI.  She probably noticed one of them, but I doubt if she would care enough.  (Now that I have talked about it, she might go looking for it and she'll find it.)  When I make such changes I deliberately don't tell her about it: she doesn't have to know.  People notice it immediately when the experience gets slightly worse, but when it gets better, even if they notice, they soon forget about it.

I wrote the first version of this program about 5 months ago.  She has posted probably around 130 pictures to her blog using the program.  If the program saved her 2 minutes for each post, it's a saving of 2 hours over 5 months.  That number doesn't look great[**], but not everything is quantifiable.  I don't know about her, but I get demotivated easily with repeated manual work.  If I had a similar blog, I would have soon stopped posting without a helper tool.  I'm sure my program makes her photo blogging experience a bit more pleasant, and that's a lot more valuable.

PS: I started writing this post with the intention of writing about what I have learned about UX, but apparently I have failed in that.  Maybe it would take some time before I can think clearly about them.

* Unless it annoys them.  I had an iPod for a long time.  If I want music, I'd press the play button; I didn't have to think about what all it did internally.  We had a Creative player that would eat up all its battery in 3 hours because it would keep the screen on when it's playing.  My brother found a workaround to turn the screen off, and thus improve battery life.  The Creative player forced him to think/care about how it functions.
** I spent maybe around 20 hours on getting the program to the state it is now.  Spending 20 hours to save 2 hours is not the wisest thing to do, obviously.

Life - 3

Life is like a dice we roll.  We may get a 2 or we may get a 12, but we can't just keep that score... we have to roll again.  Keep rolling: that's the secret.

Match point

I am in a mood for Woody Allen.  Just watched Match Point once again, and loved it this time too.  The movie didn't really have a lot of interesting dialogues, but the movie was brilliant.  A few quotes I liked from the movie:

• The man who said "I'd rather be lucky than good" saw deeply into life.
• Some people just don't have any luck.
• You never know who your neighbours are till there's a crisis.
• You can learn to push the guilt under the rug and go on.  You have to.  Otherwise it overwhelms you.
• "The innocent are sometimes slain to make way for a grander scheme.  You were collateral damage."
  "So was your own child."
  "Sophocles said, 'To never have been born may be the greatest boon of all'."

Thanks to Bharat, who recommended this movie to me a long time ago.