Bharat Matrimony's Matrimony 2.0 Website and User Experience Issues

I am a member of Bharat Matrimony.com. Today I received an email from them saying they have launched a Next Generation Matrimony 2.0 site portal which focuses on user-experience and other enhancements. Naturally that creates a lot of curiosity with every User Experience engineer to see what is in for a 2.0 matrimonial site portal.

So I logged in and.. saw a more white-spaced but the same green themed website. Certainly there are number of improvements compared to the previous site design. The new site features good-readability (keeping in mind that more than 40% of their users would be more than 45 years old parents), good AJAX implementations to provide on-the-spot responses. Simple and clear reporting about the messages (sent and received) interests (sent and received) profile completeness etc.

Regarding user-experience, I believe this new design is much better than the previous one. Though the navigation and few other things like layout may take some time to get used to. This, I believe is a have-to-live problem with every User Interface re-designs. But I hope the time taken for understanding this new UI is very less.

I haven't gone through the site fully. But one thing I noted is, when you click on the Personalized messages, they show only one message first. To read the next or all other messages, one has to click the tiny transport links on the top right corner which is a bad usability. I have 7 messages to respond. But only one message was shown. I was searching for a navigation/action button to read the next or all messages. After a few seconds, I thought "oh boy looks like I have only one message to respond to". The user experience is worse here. A user would like to read all the 7 messages and not one message at a time. Bharatmatrimony.com should have shown snapshots of all 7 messages at a single glance here.



Anyway, hope those guys at Bharatmatrimony.com corrects this UI issue and work towards enhancing the user-experience.

- Rajesh Sundaram

Interaction Design - HSBC.CO.IN's poor button design

HSBC.CO.IN's poor button design

Today I happened to watch one of my friend accessing HSBC's web site. He was checking his credit application's status online. The User Interface looked similar like the image below.



My friend selected the DoB and promptly filled in the Telephone number. The next thing he did was.. clicked the RESET button. And whoops.. everything got reset. He got frustrated and repeated the process once again. Once finished he carefully clicked the small GO button to complete the verification.

He was apparently not happy because he ran into such incidents a few time two days ago. On that day, he accidentally clicked on the RESET button and had to repeat the process once again. Also he wasn't sure if he should click the GO button. He said that he was expecting the phrase "Submit".


Conclusions:
1. The first priority or positive action buttons should be clearly visible (probably color coded or little wider and bigger). So that Users need not keep on thinking which button should they click.

2. Reset buttons should be positioned properly. If the flow is a single-form flow then the reset could be placed to the extreme right. Instead of the word RESET, opt for "Cancel" or "Close" (in case of window).

3. If the app is a Web 2.0 app, then use the Button+Text Link pattern. Example is "Save" as button + "Cancel" as text link next to it.

- Rajesh Sundaram

Nokia S40 Music Player - Usability Issue

Just bought a Nokia 3110 Classic phone for my sister. It has got all the features like Camera, Bluetooth, Music Player, Memory card and a good battery. After spending some time with the mobile phone, I found the music player's button controls to be confusing. The controls dont follow the standard convention and one has to get used to . Unlike the standard navigation pattern found in all MP3 players, the left and right keys represent Fast forward and Rewind skip functions. The Up and Down arrow keys represent Previous track and Next track.

Nokia's engineers should have considered the standard practice and 99 out of 100 people never use forward-skip or rewind-skip nowadays. That practice has gone since the cassette tapes are abandoned.




The image above shows the existing control-pattern (the first image) and suggested control-pattern (the second image). The suggestion pattern follows the standard conventions and implementing this pattern will help the users to enjoy the music experience.

- Rajesh Sundaram

Vodafone - Happy to Help you - Plagued by technical glitches

Vodafone is running a campaign of some sort... promoting their customer service with the motto "Happy to help you". Some 6 digit-salary-drawing brilliant MBA's idea! I do like their advertisements that emphasizes the "we are here to help".

Even today I received an email from Vodafone promoting the same thing. Nothing new but just a mail that showcases all their services, with an extra tagline "Happy to Help you". Vodafone is not a mobile telephony company, but a marketing agency. Let me tell you why...

Recently I was unable to make any phone calls to my home town (Erode). When dialed from other services like Airtel / Aircel, the call goes through. But from Vodafone, my home is not reachable. I do not know if that is BSNL's (which provides telephony to my home) fault or Vodafone's fault.. but the call is not going through. Having my wedding in the next two months... I feel like I am screwed badly! One way communication.

Then I dialled 111, the Hutch/Vodafone care number, the call checked my patience.

Dialling 111

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Hai. Welcome to Vodafone. We are happy to help you...
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Tamilil ariya yen ondrai dial seyyavum
For information in english press two.

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Welcome to Vodafone. I am *****. How may I help you?

bla bla blaaa....
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I am sorry to interrupt sir. But is Prepaid helpline. Kindly dial 98840 98840 to access the post-paid helpline.

Thats what I was trying to do the past 20 mins boss. The IVR is dead slow and every time I dial the number 111 it brings me here to the pre-paid helpline. I dont know what to do . Can you transfer my call to Post-paid helpline?

I am sorry sir. But you have to dial 98840 98840

Boss thats what I did .. but still the number's IVR is totally helpless.

Please try one more time sir. We are facing some technical difficulties in the call managment system. But this time it should go through. I request you to try one more time sir.

ok bye.

Thank you.. CLICK!

Vodafone sucks! So many technical glitches... so many nuisances... man! wats happening to them? And they campaign "Happy to help you".. It should be "Happy to screw you"...

- Rajesh Sundaram

IA and UI Redesign of WebHealthCentre.com

WebHealthCentre.com is one of the highly visited medical information portal in India. The site is rich in information, but lacks a proper navigation and Information Architecture. Here is my attempt to update the UI (visually) and incorporate a better navigation.

For your reference, here is the screen shot of existing site :




Updated UI and IA

Home Page:
The modules from existing home page moves into tabs. The home page now acts as a at-a-glance view of dynamic contents (Bulletin and News).

Second/Subsequent Page Model: The subsequent pages will follow the classic 3 column layout as most of the modules in WebHealthCentre are information-centric.



Information Architecture - Categorization of existing modules into new tabs. The interactive modules get into Health Centre tab and information-centric modules gets into Health and Lifestyle tab. Refer the following image for the complete grouping info.



Wish to see some updates of this sort to happen in WebHealthCentre.com. :-)

- Rajesh Sundaram

TIBCO General Interface - AJAX/JS UI Library

TIBCO General Interface sounds very interesting. After downloading and unzipping the contents, I clicked on the GI_Builder.html file and the library started loading. Unlike other libraries, TIBCO offers a Visual UI Design environment (similar to visual basic).

It takes some time to getting used to. Clearly TIBCO doesnt offer any "Getting started" kinda help for novices, as this is clearly targeted at Professional UI developers who are good in AJAX, JS and all web stuff.



For me, it may take some more time to get into every features and find out how a UX guy can make the most out of TIBCO GI toolkit. I will post another entry soon. :-)

- Rajesh Sundaram


PS : When I was in vtiger CRM an year ago, we evaluated some JS libraries and TIBCO was one of the library. But due to coding convenience and maintenance reasons, we decided to keep scriptaculous and dropped the idea of appending any new JS libraries.

Thunderbird as a SaaS and XUL web application...

I love Mozilla's Thunderbird... it's easy to use, quick and gels with any environment (office, home etc) and offers many features. I have been using Thunderbird from its initial days and I am soo happy with it.

Recently I have started using intranet web mail which made me. really unhappy ! I wish Thunderbird offers a front-end web application version which can be integrated into a intranet mail system. The TB web app should work exactly like the binary app.. with all the features, User experience etc intact. This will make the life easy for people like me. The software-as-service model is gaining momentum and here is a good chance for Mozilla Thunderbird to capture the numero-uno position.

- Rajesh Sundaram

PS : I also wish if someone would write a XUL based Thunderbird clone which can be installed in to my Firefox browser.