User-Centered Design – Kelikuru.com

TG begins practicing yoga recently. Pains from shoulders,neck and lower back bother me as a result of long working hours in front of computer. Yoga is said to be a genuine prescription to ease my pains. 

Learn to “let-go” in tough environment 

Lesson one, my Yoga teacher demonstrates the importance of deep breathing exercise. Both inhale and exhale should be done smoothly and slowly. Empty my mindset and be focus on breathing. Well, it’s a bit difficult for HongKongese, as we always feel being push or pushing others to get things done, we are living in a super-fast environment!! 

User centric worklfow can ease pain as much as yoga class - photo courtesy of incrediblerealindia

TG starts feeling better after several classes, knowing that “let-go”, “move along with flow” will make myself and others around me feel much relaxed. With this in my mind, TG learns how to be forgiving while downloading Joomla application. Yet it does not necessarily mean that a clear and clean user workflow is not essential.  

Hassles in Joomla template download  

After purchasing a new membership, TG was excited and wanted to download a set of  paid Joomla template in the hope that a new website can be equipped with the content management tool. Unfortunately, the download process is not user friendly, after a few rounds of emails, feedback posting in forums, TG still gets trapped in the forums. I get the feeling that they don’t understand users primary goal – getting the templates as easy and quickly as possible. Reading announcement or administrator’s news can be done later. 

Funny thing is I am not alone, TG  found another user complains about being push back to the forums after positng feedback. How to go out the maze? TG open a new window, back to the home url, hit download again while I am still log-on.   

As a usability practitioner and a user, TG  is not happy with the process which is not intuitive at all. If they can offer a user-centric work-flow and create a “don’t let me think” navigation scheme between forum and download center,  TG will suffer less with my shoulder pains. My Yoga teacher will be happier…. 

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Is it mobile phone?

Is it text message, SMS?

Is it MSN, Yahoo messenger?

Nope, it’s Facebook.

It becomes a buzz in the town. Social network site Facebook has recently dwarfed the above communication tools due to news reports sweeping across media. Thanks to the on-going reports of local TV and press media, stories from social networking site Facebook have an amusing start this week in Hong Kong.  

Speaking to a group of local media early this week, Hong Kong magnate Mr Li Ka-shing reckoned socal media Facebook’s future IPO was inevitable. Mr Li jokingly told the press that server will probably be overloaded and down if he posted his own profile and daily activities in the Palo Alto-based social networking site. The Hong Kong richest man has his US$120 million worth of investment in Facebook over the last three years.  

Then to the end of this week, another headline story in Hong Kong newspaper is in connection to Facebook again. A local political activitist uses Facebook app in iPhone to warn  his friends of being careful after he got beaten up on street for unknown reason.

Another documentary story was reported about a few weeks ago to show how Facebook was widely used for marketing in shopping malls,offline advertising campaigns and social function gatherings.

TG is very curious, talking to a couple of social media evangelists in order to learn how to effectively measure this online marketing campaign. Apart from emarketer’s latest report, which gives me some insights, I certainly want to know more. Enlightening me!

Social media marketers seems to be nothing more than being boasted of numbers of fans in Facebook. Notice how the results are presented for a campaign wrap-up - figures are tweaked by TG anyway.

• 1,500 products shared
• 1200+ comments
• 600+ “likes”
• 6000+ interactions on our Facebook fan page
• in only three weeks

facebook facejoke

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Beijing China is heavily hit by sand storm, blocking street view everywhere in the capital city; Google officially announced her partial leaving China market stirs up another storm not only in internet history but also in Sino-US relationship. A piece of news that cannot be omitted.

Google has officially stopped censoring search results in China, but in a somewhat roundabout way. Google.cn is no longer there, visitors are being directed to Google Hong Kong.

Chinese internet users can still use Google.cn webtools including Google Web Mail, Google Reader, Google Map, Google Doc and other online services. So will they think they cannot survive without Google cn search?  Baidu, Soso will come after the search market?  What’s next?  Huh.. a lot of open questions.

Keep a copy of Google cn homepage in my album as it probably won’t be up again at least for a while.

Google china

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