Release early, release often is a philosophy where you release the product as soon as possible and rapidly iterate it to perfection by listening to your customers. A polished release, on the other hand is where your product, in its initial version is solid, lacks obvious bugs and has just enough features to satisfy a majority of your consumers. Most software companies adopt either one of this and that choice is not superficial. In fact, it...

A week ago, I got a new mobile phone, the windows phone 7 primarily for testing out the user interface, and some programming.  The device I got was the HTC HD 7 from SingTel which costed me around 890$, 2$ higher than the iPhone 4 16GB. In this blog post I’ll review the HTC hardware comparing it with competing phones like the Samsung Omnia as well as the software it runs, Windows Phone OS comparing it to iOS and Android. While this...

Most users think, Mac UI is all about slick graphics and “cool” icons. Well, that might be true partially, but user interface design isn’t about photoshopping or designing cool looking icons. According to Jakob Nielsen, aesthetics is just one aspect of usability. There is much more to user friendly software than just the “cool factor” or great icons. Recently, I was using Microsoft’s Excel to edit a dozen...

If you were following my tweets, you might be knowing that I got a invitation from Microsoft to test Microsoft Office 2010. Invitation to test Microsoft Office 2010 Yeah, From the screen shot it should be evident that I’m using a mac now. I testing Office 2010 by installing it on my Windows 7 Virtual Box image. Being a usability guy myself, In this article, I will primarily focus on usability aspects of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and...

OK, many of the programmers would have been confused as how to design a dialog on your website. In what order should the dialog contain the OK and Cancel Buttons? Should it be OK – Cancel like Windows or Cancel – OK like the Mac? Are there any “rule of thumb” why a certain standard should be followed? Or is it just a matter of taste? Firstly Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines state that, rather than OK or...