Author Archive
By now, all good designers and developers realize the importance of usability for their work. Usable products offer great user experiences, and great user experiences lead to happy customers.
Six common mistakes and recommendations for product design and usability -
1. Usability Vs Utility
Utility refers to the ability of the product to perform tasks. The more tasks the product is designed to perform, the more utility it has. Usability refers to the ease of learning and performing these tasks.
Most software give higher priority to features than usability. As a result it becomes more and more confusing for the end user to get work done.
2. Liking it Vs Using It
Likeability is always a desirable trait in a product. If people like the product, they are more likely to use it and to recommend it to others. But as with utility, likeability is often confused with usability.
People often like a product for reasons unrelated to utility and usability. They may be attracted to its styling and flash, or to the status they believe the product confers upon them. People tend to like highly usable products, but you should not assume that means a well-liked product is usable.
3. Discovery Vs Flow
Some of the most widely used products do not have an instructions manual e.g. toothbrush or Skype.
Products with “Installation Manuals” turn me off. IMO, there is place on earth for installation manuals. And admin guides should be only when you want to learn a little extra or troubleshoot. Instead the product should try and use inline or in-GUI help as much as possible.
Discovery involves looking for, and finding, a product’s feature in response to a particular need. And it gets worse when a complex feature needs multiple inputs or choices to be made.
I am a big fan of wizards. I think the task becomes much simpler when broken down into series of actions.
4. Tiny Meaningless buttons
The buttons should signify action. The most common mistake with buttons is when they are labeled “OK” which in my opinion makes very little sense.
Buttons should have lables which signify clear actions like - “Modify Report Schedule”
5. Duplicate Actions
Quite often, products have more than one ways of performing the same task. This is confusing and often irritating. There should always be one clear way of performing an action.
6. Don’t Give Too Many Choices
Never confuse flexibility with giving too many choice. You would never buy car from a salesman who gives you 8-10 names for “the cars that might suit you”. Instead you are more likely to buy, when the salesman gives you 1 (or max 2) options and convinces you.
If you are sure that more than 80% of your audience is likely to vote “yes” for the option, please make it a default. Or if you really want it, add it to “advanced”.
Disclosure
If you think inSync is a very user friendly product, you would be pleasently surprised with the upcoming upgrade. Usability has been one of our core focus areas in inSync v3 release.
February 22nd, 2009
We all pay our monthly electricity bills. I am sure no one wants to own a power plant 
But, on the contrary most of us own cars and very few rent it for daily use.
The two most important factors which decide how we want to use these two services are -
- The cost of ownership
- The cost and effort in maintenance
Cloud computing today promises benefits (which are similar to using electricity) for computing, hosted application and storage. Although the offer is very lucrative, but their is a dark side to this as well.
The post just tries to some aspects which you must keep in mind before making the plunge.
The Dark Side of the Cloud
Application Integration
Most of the services like SimpleDB, EBS, SQS still needs a lot of application integration and porting. And that’s something enterprises hate. It’s one of the primary reasons the X86 architecture and IPV4 are so widely used. Even if someone ports the application to these services, he is guaranteed to be locked with it for the rest of his life
Services like salesforce.com don’t need any porting, but there have been cases of access to data being refused customers who wish to change the vendor.
Uptime and QoS Guarantees
Most of these services including Amazon and Salesforce do not give uptime and QoS guarantees. The billing and EULA are free from any such clauses.
And when there is a downtime, you can’t do much than start calling the support center to play the blame-game. And its funny when see the the cloud provider talking the same language to its service provider
It’s No Way Even Close to Perfect
Take a recent unfortunate situation for Ylastic, a company that provides a single front-end to manage Amazon Web Services, who was recently an unwillingly participant in one of these cloud bursts. Ylastic noticed something strange occurring with one of the Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) Elastic Block Stores (EBS).
But something wasn’t quite right. And over the course of a few hours the story played out via Twitter as Ylastic noticed issues with its EBS instances. When the problem was finally identified, Ylastic discovered that the data could not be recovered. They were forced to recover from an earlier snapshot, that contained only a subset of the data.
Finally, after recovering what data they could, Ylastic had to go to its customers with the unfortunate message:
“AWS has finally terminated the frozen instances. But the EBS volume is still detaching and has been for hours. It doesn’t seem like we will be able to get into it at this point. Some time in the last month or so, our EBS snapshotting of this stuck volume seems to have stopped working correctly…. We have gone back and run through all the snapshots, and the last good snapshot that we have is from October 1.”
Who was at fault? Amazon? Ylastic? Truly, no one. It was simply a combination of issues. A perfect storm in the cloud, as it were. And that perfect storm resulted in data loss for Ylastic and its customer base.
Control
Take for example the case when you take up a cheap hosted website plan on a shared server. You can still negotiate uptime and QoS guarantees. But, what you just can’t control is a SPAM King sharing the same server and IP address with you
Most likely you will face two problems -
- A slow response on the website- the SPAM King has taken up the computing
- Public mail servers will mark the mail traffic from you as spam
Plus, there been many stories around salesforce (read this and this) and twitter getting hacked.
ROI
Cost of ownership for a power plant is so damn high, that you just can’t afford one even if you are not happy with your power company. That exactly has to be the case for the cloud. No one would think of hosting his own solution when the cloud offers the same peanuts.
February 11th, 2009
The recent Journalspace data loss episode, is a good lesson for all of us. I don’t know what exactly went wrong, but it highlights the fact that real businesses today can’t depend upon only tape/disk based archival of business critical data.
IMO, a good data protection strategy should value following points -
- Clear understanding of RPO and RTO for data protection
- Local disk-based backup for faster recovery.
- Remote-Replication for disaster recovery
- Archival and e-discovery
In simple terms RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is - “up to what point in time the data can be recovered” and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) implies - “how much time would it take to recover data”. These goals differ from business to business. But, any real enterprise can’t depend on slow tapes for this, especially when it comes to critical customer data.
The two terms - “Backup” & “Archival” are often confused with each other. And as I see it going forward, more and more enterprises would use local disk based backup-recovery for lowering RPO & RTO. The Tape/VTL/Tape would only be used for archival of older and currently-not-being-used data for compliance or specific business reasons.
With remote IP-based replication almost becoming commodity now, it can easily be used to avoid any local disasters. But, it would be interesting to see it being integrated with local disk-based backup systems. This could reduce load on the production server and make recovery simple.
On the good side, I loved the CouchSurfing 2.0 Rised from the Ashes story covered by Luxman. The company lost the entire MySQL database almost two years back because of a faulty file-system. Founder & CEO Casey Fenton announced company’s death. Later, Fenton’s email was met with vocal opposition to the termination of the project and considerable support for its recreation.
“CouchSurfing 2.0″ was announced early in July 2006, with the intent to be operational within 10 days. The initial implementation of CouchSurfing 2.0 actually launched after only four days.
January 19th, 2009
This post is in reference to the forums discussion - http://forums.druvaa.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=16
Based on the feedback received, I am compiling the list of features planned for version 3.0 (code name “Apollo 11″). The public beta is due on Jan 7, 2009.
Major Features -
- Full PC Backup - Backup OS, application, data and settings. The PC installations within the organization have more or less same OS and applications, but minor differences in drivers and apps make the job of system cloning very difficult and storage exhaustive. Version 3.0 will use data de-duplication to provide a bandwidth and storage efficient way for the same.
- Bare-metal Restore - Restore OS/application/aata from scratch using a bootable “Druvaa Bare-metal Restore” disk.
- “Search” file by name in restore - very helpful for large no. of files.
- Performance Boost for Large File Backup - Changes in deduplication algorithm to boost incremental backup performance for large files (1GB+) by 300%. Very useful for Outlook PST backups.
- Better control over sync frequency - Admin can control sync frequency and whether a user can pause backup.
- Sync profile automatically every 5 minutes - Currently the profile is synced just before the backup request. This is confusing for the admin, from 3.0 the client would poll and check profile changes every 5 minutes.
- MSI Installable - Helpful for automated AD-integrated installations for large organizations.
Minor Features -
- Server diagnostics Option - A single button to collect all the information relevant for troubleshooting and email it to support _at_ druvaa
- Admin configurable relative folders -Admin should be able to configure folders relative to user’s home directory.
- Import Users from CSV file - this is to cater to the case when direct AD access is not possible.
- Take company name and logo for personalization -Use the company information for server configuration panel and web-restore.
- Server health notifications- Add “uptime” and “last error” information to server health status tab. Send the same in reports.
- Personalize authentication email - Let the admin add more information to the email carrying user’s auth key.
- Advance settings for PostgreSQL installation-Let the admin configure data / archive log directories for each SIS creation.
Please use this post or the forum thread to voice your opinion on what changes/features would you like to see in your favorite backup software.
To enroll for the beta program and get a free evaluation copy, please send an email to beta@druvaa.com.
[update]
The public beta would be released by Jan 7, 2009.
* Added 2 suggestions to feature list.
December 22nd, 2008
