Tag: User Experience Design

ReMIX – a property search Android solution by Ideafarms

If you had a chance to read our earlier post here, you would probably agree with us that despite the vast array of solutions available in the market today, property hunting is still quite a tedious task for anybody. There is a clear need for a simple yet effective solution that will be available for the user at her point-of-inspiration! Which is where a smart phone comes into the picture.

There is a distinct value that a mobile solution and especially one on a smart phone platform brings to the user.  Smart phones today have practically become an extension of our being; our personal information, wants, needs and traits are all captured within our smart devices. We carry them with us on our person and it’s available with us wherever we go. It is little wonder then that if you are a smart phone user and are also looking for a house, your first instinct will be to look for an app that can help you do just that.

Which is exactly what ReMIX (Real-Estate Mobile India X-change), an Android solution by Ideafarms is designed to do. ReMIX comes packed with features like:

  1. A visual & interactive map-based navigation
  2. Location-based property listing
  3. Property listing and search – for buy or  rent
  4. Filtering of selections based on a user’s needs
  5. One-tap to connect with property owners / agents
  6. Remember properties and mark for future reference
  7. Set Alerts
  8. White-label product

All of these features and more, backed with our User Experience Design capabilities, ensure that you will have a handy and easy to use solution available with you when you go looking for your next house.

A White-Label Product?!

Did the words ‘white-label’ catch your fancy there? Yes, ReMIX is actually designed as an offering for existing Real Estate Classifieds Portals / Realtors / Real-estate Developers to integrate and offer as a value- add to their existing suite of solutions for their smart phone users. On purchasing a license of ReMIX, all you need to do is hook-up your existing database with ReMIX and you can have your own simple-to-use, branded application available for your smart phone users practically from tomorrow! In effect, we are taking away the headache from you of spec-ing out and developing a solution in-house. You can leave those nitty-gritties to the experts – us –  and have a spanking new Android app in the Android-Market with zero time to market!

All this sounds interesting and you want to know more, get in touch with us. You can email us at its[dot]MAGIC[at]Ideafarms[dot]com and we will be happy to set up a demo for you.

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Ideas of the week 28th-Oct-2011

This week’s post for the Ideas of the week featuring ideas that might change our world.

 

1. Recycling plastic is now possible
Recycle+ Environment+Mike Biddle

Mike Biddle has broken the loop and found a solution to recycle 80-90 % of plastic waste that is lying around and damaging the environment. More

 

 

 

2. Tiles that harvest energy from footsteps
Kinetic energy

Laurence Kembell-Cook, the director of Pavegen Systems has created Pavegen tiles – a low carbon solution that aims to bring kinetic energy from footsteps of pedestrians. More

 

 

 

3. Smartmirror using AR to display much more than just reflection
AR + Innovation+ Smartmirror

This Smart-Mirror uses Augmented Reality to present users with a wealth of information such as weather and news, social network feeds, streamed internet TV, personal health information and can even act as a personal coach.More

 

 

 

4. Self-steering tractor to make farmers lives a lot easier
Tractor+ Farmers+Technology

A team of researchers in Belgium have developed a robotic self-steering tractor that has a steering system which analyzes the terrain conditions and calculates the optimal speed and turning radius in real-time. More

 

 

5. How Social Digital your company is?
Social Business Index+ SocialDigital

A site called the Social Business Index uses an undisclosed algorithm to provide a real-time assessment and ranking of how social (or connected) a company is. More

 

 

 

6. California’s Government gears up for 21st century
Technology+iphone app+Government

San Francisco’s government is using technology to get more accessible to its people. They are saving lives with an iPhone app that gives anyone with CPR certification the option to be notified if someone nearby is having a cardiac issue and need immediate help. More

 

 

7. Take This Lollipop… If You Dare
Facebook+Dare+Takethislollipop

It’s a site called Take This Lollipop, and in order to best experience it, I can’t tell you what it is. Just that it’s quite exclusive, and you’ll need a Facebook account to use it.

 

 

 

 

 

This week’s post compiled by : Karan Guglani

We too used Google+, and how!

Inspired by this post on Gizmodo which urges you to use Google+ for the main feature that it offers – sharing a post with only a select group of people – I got an idea to use it to get feedback for our latest Android App (more on that later) within a close group of trusted folks who I knew could offer valuable inputs.

For those who are yet to use it, what happens in Google+ is that you can add people to circles (and people can add you to circles too of course.) The USP is that you can choose to share your content (post, photos, rants, etc. etc.) with only a select few and so then only those people can see it or can comment on it. A little more digging around and of course with the help of the very good folks on Twitter, I discovered that you can also disable these few people from sharing it further with more people. So there, your secret is safe! Yay!

Safe with this knowledge, I shared the link for the Android App (which still needs some kinks worked out of it before it can be shared with people at large) with my Circle on Google+ called ‘Ideafarmers’.

Knowing I was sharing this with people who are working at Ideafarms or have worked here before, tech nuts and some even Android junkies ( 😉 ), definitely people with good ideas and who understand the value of the kind of user-experience Ideafarms tries to deliver, I was not disappointed. Within minutes we were bombarded with encouragement (which felt really nice) and very useful suggestions, most of which is already being put to good use towards improving the application. We all know how important early user-feedback is for any application. And if you are able to use a social network to gather it.. well it kind of validates the value of a social network beyond the ‘likes and +1s’. The benefit that Google+ adds here is that it allows a conversation to build around a topic – which was perhaps not as easily achieved over Twitter or Facebook earlier -which facilitates easier participation through which people can bring in their collective experience and expertise.

Infact we were so pleased with the result that now Ideafarms too has a Google+ account which we definitely plan to use for collaboration over our future projects / products and sharing information about all that interests you and us. You can search for Ideafarms and add us to your circles and if you think you would also like to participate and help us test and improve the early releases of our applications, do drop us a line and we can add you to our ‘Tech Fun’ group :-).

Also, if you have also used Google+ in any such interesting way, we would love to hear about it! Do share your experience and ideas.

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Revisiting – The Original Sin

The Original Sin (image source: IT Magz – October 2007)

RT @AnubhavSharma: Why is ‘save’ icon still a floppy? <— This question recently on my Twitter timeline prompted me to dig out from our archives this old article by Sunil Malhotra for IT Magz back in 2007, titled ‘The Original Sin‘.

The article had also mentioned the same issue and I post excerpts from it here –

Continuous and aggressive improvement is not as easy as it sounds. There are aspects that we technophiles must make ourselves additionally accountable for. Things that go so far unnoticed that they become absurdities. Here’s a simple provocation:

Who in today’s world would even know what a floppy disk is! The “Save” icon has lost its context but Microsoft does not seem to have even noticed its extinction. This illustrates how oversight or short-sight can create habits; even users stop noticing things that were meant to help them in the first place. The suggestion that emerges from the above example is to design interfaces that communicate at higher levels of abstraction so that their meaning is not lost when products of everyday use become obsolete. To think things through instead of either immediately imitating “œfamiliarity” or rushing into applying our existing skills. Imagine having the graphic of a dinosaur as a signage for a wildlife sanctuary in today’s world.

I can only suggest that we, the IT community, take a higher degree of responsibility for the total software experience – simply, that from our current focus on functionality and performance we must move up a notch into sustained usability.

Definitely something to think about. I love the term ‘Sustained Usability’ used here. Something you don’t get to hear of much, especially not from Experience Designers.

You can view the PDF of the entire article from here or access it from the IT Magz website.

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