2 Min SKSM

New Consumer applications have taken the human centric design and simplified UX to such a great height that its influence on Enterprise application is inevitable. But are Consumer applications and Enterprise applications comparable in terms of its users and complexities? When I see enterprise applications (like SAP, Oracle, even Salesforce), I see this  Now in the name of simplicity, it will be foolish to expect this in cockpit (within budget) Consumer Applications and Enterprise applications are different. A simplified and minimalistic App design may score high in Learnability ad Delightful but will be Useless and Ineffective for most of the advanced users. This is "TRAP OF SIMPLICITY".  There is also no second opinion that enterprise Apps are less human centric and look drab in the name of "Complexity" and "Flexibility". That is "EXCUSE OF COMPLEXITY".  The scope of improvement in Enterprise App UX is humongous but may lie in different directio...

Imagine a mall hosting 3.7lac sellers selling 20 Cr products.  Will it not look like a tropical jungle, so dense that anyone can be lost. This is Amazon.in, literally the Amazon forest in ecom industry. Designing Amazon.in in a way that user can easily maneuver and reach required lane of products can be a dream as well as a nightmare for the best of best Designers. But unfortunately, when I think of bad design, Amazon comes up in mind. Let's conduct an user journey of a buyer searching for Realme mobile phone. I am selecting Mobile phone, because 80% traffic in e-com takes this route and so at least this path should have been developed matured, right?  There are two users:  Amy, the browser. She does not like to ask help from anyone in mall and searches the product by strolling across lanes. Online, she takes her time to browse through the pages and find the the product.  Bill, the searcher: He asks for help as soon as he enters the mall, takes the directions and pic...

Continuing my previous blog  FASCINATION AND TRAP OF AI, ML, BLOCKCHAIN , this lure is not limited to management only. Industry, as well, such as Agriculture has seen much pompous joy towards these technologies and talking "Agriculture 4.0" day in and out. More and more entrepreneurs are creating startups, impressions and scaling up horizontally across globes and then vanishing serially without making a scratch on surface. Industry has a prestigious name for this post as well "Serial Entrepreneur". Because the problem statement here is not to create "Painkillers" but to use new-age technologies and possibly make some "Vitamins" as by-products.  Case in point: One of the Indian Company used Image processing, AI and ML to predict possible pest attack. When I asked what is the efficacy, the ground staff said it's accuracy is 50-50. Well my coin can do a better job than this because it costs not more than 1 Rs! How and when of Industry Revolution...

 Any consultant who says "Future is in AI, Ml or Blockchain", he/she has to be looked upon with jaundiced eye.  These new-age technologies have become such buzzwords that have created cognitive traps for executives. If the company wants to be disruptive, executives are to be seen as visionary, they have to invest in them, don't they! What is AI and ML? When it's difficult to predict from data using rule based logic i.e. "if...then", we can think of deploying Machine Learning which can generalize predictive capability to solve more and more similar problems repeatedly. If there are no generalization then it is probably pure statistics and normal software. If the entire system can run autonomously and reaches a level where intervention of human intelligence is no more required, it is called AI. A good principle to assess if ML can be used is, can a human predict from your stored data. In the end output of system cannot have information that are not available i...

"We are still coding, you will get UAT build after Sprint 5 i.e. after 6 months" "We understand this is not so user friendly. But this is as per Business requirement. We cant change it" "The UI is not intuitive. But UAT is not a phase where we can change Business requirement." Many customers may have heard software vendors passing these comments in review discussion for a project which was supposed to be completed with AGILE model. Beware, they are all waterfall vendors mis-branding themselves as Agile.  Agile is not set of tools or techniques but a philosophy. I call it AGILE-ISM: more C ollaboration, more C ommunication, open to more C hanges to provide the most  C ustomer centric product. Scrum, Sprints, Retros, Kanban - all are just tools and techniques. Project has to be released sooner so that customer can start using it. Changes have to accepted so that project is not obsolete. What is agreed upon between customer and vendor is not list of features ...

There are many SMEs who may want to track their field force but such application development is not so pocket friendly. One such company reached out to me and I took it as a hobby project. To my surprise, it came out so nicely that kept me thinking how powerful Goggle services are.  Customer required  Configurability in drafting information the company will like to capture during field activities Geo tagging field activities  Dashboard and analytics Solution: Google form was at the center in creating the solution. Google form integrated with Google Script was able to Geocode and reverse geocode. This link was then opened from native Android App using webview. Pre-filled form gave convenience to ground users of not filling redundant info every time e.g. employee details. Google form was then integrated with Sheet and then Map to create complete GIS based dashboard. Google Sheet charts, maps were then integrated with Google site to create a dashboard for manager.  Goog...

For sometime, the thought troubled me. Electric Vehicles get the juice from power grid so are they really eco-friendly or its just a marketing stunt. Lets analyze: We need 20KWh at the production site to charge EVs for 100 km run. A coal based thermal plant (in India) emits 980 grams of CO2 per 1 kWh as per CEA  considering Gross Calorific Value and Station Heat Rate. So 100 KM by EV emits 19.4 KG of CO2. And the same 100 m run by a Petrol hatchback will emit 13.2 KG ! Oh my my!!! However, Indian grid does not provide power only from coal based thermal plant. It's still 80:20. Simple algebra will tell us we need 68% power from thermal and remaining from renewable to match the emission level of Petrol Hatchback.  But renewable need balancing plants to mitigate variability in grid. Normally gas based plants are used for this purpose. Thankfully gas only emits 50% of CO2 than that of coal based plants. So we need renewable plants towards 60% to make EVs "ECO-FRIENDLY". Long ...

The famous Sapir - Whorf hypothesis says that language influence the way people think i.e. linguistic relativism .  Whorf proposed: 'We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, ...and is codified in the patterns of our language'. Sapir said: 'Human beings...are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. Normal discussion on pros and cons of programming languages contains (un)availability of features. But both languages are based on same computational powers and should be able to perform all tasks that the hardware is capable of. However, how these languages defer possibly are concepts about ease of use and expressiveness. And this may restrict solving ability of developers as explained by linguistic relativism . Low level language developers are not restricted by any language concepts but the actual capability of hardware. In the end, they are the closest to assembler, o...