I notice User Experience (UX) differences and how they affect my productivity. I love products who focus on great UX. I love products who continually evolve their UX to become better and better. You know what I love even more – products who recognize good UX behaviors and adapt it to their own. And I recently came across a fine example of the latter – Twitter.
This is the android twitter app. Do you see the “New Tweets” button at the top. This is very new. Facebook has had this for ages (it is called “New Stories” and it the button has a more oval structure to it). Clicking on the “New Tweets” button lets you know that there are new tweets and that you can click on that to scroll up to the latest tweets. This also saves you a pull down gesture, which is kind-of hard to do if you are holding and operating your phone with one hand (which is a pretty common use case).
My principal point here is that, if you recognize a good UX mechanism, it is my personal believe that, there is nothing wrong in adapting the mechanism to your product (unless it is patented ofcourse). It helps standardize UX across classes of apps. There is also a sense of sharing between the companies. I am sure FB spent quite a bit of UX effort coming up with their equivalent.
Request: As always, I have one request, which I am sure Twitter will not see, but that is fine, I will indulge myself. I would love to see the “New Tweets” button enhanced with the number of new tweets – example – “132 New Tweets”. Twitter has the underlying algorithms for this, since it is present in their webapp.
I recently noticed something awkward when I was searching for a product in amazon.in. I had searched for USB hubs and when I scrolled down to the bottom of the list, I saw this:
As much as a nationalist that I am, as much as I am pragmatic to think a common language of communication is a good idea, I feel that this would go against the grain for a significant population of online India.
While the fact that Hindi is India’s national language itself is a contentious issue, I cannot imagine, how an online market place platform such as amazon can generalize and use a non-English phrase in a website which is mostly English otherwise.
Please do not get me wrong. I am not an anti-Hindi person, while most people who have read my name and figured out that I am from South India, have already stereotyped/judged me. I am proud of the fact that there is atleast one incident in a month, where a colleague/acquaintance mistakes me for a “North Indian”. Yes, I speak fairly good colloquial hindi.
Getting back to the issue at hand, I am wondering what the Program Manager, who was handling this campaign was thinking. Hindi is one of several tens of languages in India. Was there an intent to do some data mining and show this Hindi term only for some demographics? Or was it for all? I have worked in an online search entity before, and I know you can do magic like that. In a country like India, linguistic patriotism runs deep in the blood – to the extent, that the first partitioning of the states was done on the basis of language spoken.
In India (as in other areas such as Switzerland), it is not a question of whether a user understands the meaning of “Aur Dikhao”. The user would know the meaning and still pretend not know and judge the portal for being linguistically chauvinistic.
Amazon, please be inclusive and remove this abomination of an anomaly. If you really wish to do this, translate the entire damn page into Hindi. And while you are it, translate it also into Tamizh, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Punjabi, Assamese, and the two dozen more ‘predominant’ languages of India.
I read an article today that Flipkart is beginning to work with the famous Dabbawalas of Mumbai for last mile delivery. The efficiency of these tiffin box carriers of Mumbai has been lauded so much that there is even an Harvard Business Review Case Study on them. Much has been written about these men who wear the white cotton kurtas and ensure hot food from homes reach office goers at the perfect time. In other words, it is a classic example of a supply chain model which has been perfected over the years.
So, now on to todays news of Flipkart and their tie-up with the dabbawalas. Apparently at this moment in time, this is in pilot, and a group of dabbawalas are being trained for delivery. Initially they would only be handling orders that are already paid for (would not be handling COD).
This is a pretty innovative thing that Flipkart is getting into. I see several areas where both Flipkart and the dabbawalas can mutually benefit from such a tie-up.
Additional income for the dabbawalas: This is probably the one that bubbles up first. The dabbawalas current schedule mostly works in 2 spikes. One spike to delivery the dabbas from home to offices, and the other to collect the dabbas back from the offices and deliver it back to home. The other times are pretty much open to them to earn additional income.
Additional delivery people for Flipkart: They can choose to be the ‘uber’ of delivery-men. Let me elaborate here. When dabbawalas have their spike time done, and they are free, they can intimate to flipkart, that they are free and for how long. If the logistics and supply chain software is able to allot him a ‘ride’ or a ‘job’ that can be executed within that time, and he is comfortable with it, he can pick it up, and deliver it. This creates an additional pool of delivery people for flipkart. (Another pilot is happening in Bangalore with Flipkart trying a crowd-sourced delivery model).
Processes knowledge sharing: The dabbawalas have perfected the art of sorting, colour-coding, and routing, within a congested city like Mumbai. If they have arrived at this amazing process, which works in a chaotic environment like Mumbai (and mostly using either public transportation or low-key transportation such as bicycles), this model can be replicated in many other cities.
At the end of the day, what the dabbawalas do is to pick up dabba from point X and deliver it to point Y. Isnt this what Flipkart does too, in its last mile delivery – pick up package from Flipkart distribution center at location X, and drop off at location Y (customer)?
This may not be only one way. For all you know, Ekart (which is the delivery wing of Flipkart) may have come up with some processes as well, which uses more modern tech and the use of sophisticated algorithms. It is very well possible that some of this might end up being beneficial in automating processes in the dabbawala community. An immediate example that comes me is bar-coding stickers instead of the traditional color coding.
Dabba delivery as a business: Well, who knows. If this proves lucrative and serves multiple purposes such as delivery on the way, flipkart might even get on to it.
Food delivery: If you replace the origin of the dabba from home to a restaurant, you have food delivery. If you replace restaurant to a catering service, you have a subscription based tiffin service.
Disclaimer:These are the thoughts of an engineer who is not fully familiar with the ecommerce domain. So there may be holes in this post, which are predominantly because of my ignorance. I urge the readers/commenters to fill these holes if possible, and I will be indebted to them for improving my knowledge, and showing me the light.
This post is a result of several emails from recruiters that I get that promise me the promised land if I join Flipkart or Myntra or Snapdeal. Note that I am not talking about Amazon in this post, and I will try and mention why, somewhere in this post. The above mentioned three companies are, at this point in time, and to the best of my knowledge, are pure ecommerce businesses.
My definition of pure ecommerce businesses: Online portals which serve as a market place for vendors to hawk their goods online. Customers are spared the ignominy of visiting a dozen websites to get the best deal, rather they go to this one large market place, where they get the ‘best deal’.
My definition of best price and how it is achieved: You may ask (as I did, until I recently read an article online) on how can these vendors can offer these special deals. The online market place offers incentive to these vendors/sellers to come and sell in their market places. If the vendor incurs a loss of Rs. X because he is offering a certain special deal, the marketplaces compensates for this loss. And in some cases, even more so that, the vendor continues to operate in this method (of offering continuous special deals).
My understanding of where the money comes from: The principal source for these moneys to offer to the vendors come from the venture capital funding. I see no other source. There are some fees that the vendors/sellers need to pay, but I would only imagine that to take care of the operational costs (servers, bandwidth etc) and perhaps offset a portion of the salaries.
Ok, now that I have exhausted my understanding of how the business works (and yes I know, this is probably an extremely myopic and 50000ft view), let us talk about my understanding of what goes into making all of this happen – on the technical side (because I am an engineer, you see).
Let us talk about the various components that form running a market place such as Flipkart (or similar others).
Web UI: This involves the actual web page front end. There are three kinds of people involved in getting this together:
UI/UX designers: These are design people. They may or may not code. They talk about fonts, mouse click counts, positioning of advertisements, CSS, positional relevance, cognitive dissonance etc. In short, these people design the front end web page, so that the user can use it with most ease. They also design such that users are persuaded to purchase. And not just purchase anything, sometimes, UX designers can design such that, the users are persuaded to buy what the market place wants you to buy.
UI/UX coders: These are folks who translate what the UI/UX designers mean into actual code. These are engineers who specialize in HTML/CSS/Javascript, perhaps the LAMP stack, and let me just say similar visualization technologies (since there are just too many of them now, a few propping up every few months).
Backend engineers:
The backend engineers probably can be broken down into a few specialists:
DBAs: These are folks who specialize in figuring out how the back end database should be structured – what are the tables? what are the table fields? What are the dependencies between the tables, between the fields? How should the tables be indexed? These are all questions, when answered correctly, results in a beautiful database experience, which guarantees the fastest data-access/response time. This means, when the frontend requests for some data from the DB, it gets it in the shortest amount of time.
Engineers who write the controllers: Theoretically, this can potentially be a separate category outside of backend, but most times, I have seen this to be lumped with the backend. These engineers write the piece of code, which take the input from the frontend, translate it into appropriate queries for the DB, and when the results are thrown back, give it in a appropriate way back to the front end. Mostly a conduit code, but performance and encapsulation is very important here.
Theorists/Algorithm Specialists: These are the people, IMHO, who differentiate the market place company from its competitors. They design prediction algorithms, based on data mining (what they now call big data). They probably design algorithms for pricing as well. Other theoretical areas where the theorists work on are algorithms to speed up information retrieval, techniques to cache data, so that performance of the frontend improves, techniques to make the entire marketplace solid/robust, failover techniques for the DB as well as web sessions etc. These are just a sampling, but I would imagine, an application of this size would throw up several ‘researchy’ challenges.
Mobile: By looking at its analytics, Flipkart has figured out that a majority of the traffic is coming in through the mobile space. This would involve specialized UX designers, and app programmers. Considering that there are three different app platforms (Android, iOS, WindowsPhone), there need to be three different teams doing this.
Platform: While I did mention this fleetingly, if flipkart is indeed taking care of their servers/datacenters, then this is a whole set of engineering challenges that need to be solved. I know this is involved deep work. Google has its own global infrastructure team just to keep the platform going.
Supply Chain: While this could be included in Miscellaneous, I saw that there was a renewed intense push in this direction from Flipkart and others. This is the software that tracks inventory in the fulfillment centers. It is also the software that tracks the delivery and procurement of various goods that are being sold in the market place. With Flipkart, getting into selling perishables (cookies etc), this part of the platform becomes tricky.
Advertisement: I got this from a recent YourStory article that I read. With a recent acquisition of adequity, it looks like Flipkart is getting into the advertisement business as well. The motivation for this, is the huge user base that the market place has now acquired. The large the user base, the more eyeballs, an advertiser can gather. This is ripe for classic captive audience type marketing (example of captive audience marketing – ads inside movie theatres).
Miscellaenous: There could be several misc features that one could imagine to improve the overall experience and robustness of the market place. An example that comes to mind is the ‘zippy’ online payment gateway that flipkart wrote on their own. Instead of outsourcing the payment gateway to one of the thirdparty players such as Citrus, they wrote their own. This is definitely a good thing. They improve their robustness (lesser dependency on a third party) and most likely reduces their expenses too (no fees to be paid to a thirdparty payment gateway).
OK, Now the question which leaves me befuddled:
I keep hearing that Flipkart (or one of the others) are expanding and creating new groups. I also know that Flipkart has established groups for all of the above categories that I mentioned (and probably more that I may have left out!). And I am not even talking about their ebooks business. That is a whole different take. Also, I am talking only about engineers. These businesses have a whole different sales side – vendor acquisitions, price point/deal negotiators, etc.
What more is there for them to grow out on? A market place is a market place. There are some building blocks that they can make better. But what more?
And now, I will mention, why I explicitly said, I am not talking about Amazon. The US/global Amazon company does a whole lot more than just the market place. They are experimenting with fresh grocery/vegetable delivery. They are experimenting with twitter #hashtag based ordering. They experimented with post office box based collection. So many more things. Some of those are also slowly trickling down to their India subsidiary for local applications. Their recent announcement of Amazon Kirana is one of those – last mile connectivity/delivery from local kirana stores.
I have not really seen Flipkart grow in these adjacencies at all. Or perhaps they are not too public about their experiments – that I am not privy to.
This question on what more are they hiring for, brings a lot of doubt and ambiguity in my mind, every time someone reaches out to me.
If someone has some time and energy, and would like to educate me (via comments or email), I would love to get educated.
Update: I added sections on mobile, advertising, supply-chain, and platform, after getting somewhat more educated. Some of the education came from here.
Paul McLellan writes on Semiwiki about a leaked internal memo inside Intel talking about Intel getting out the mobile race. They would be merging the tablets/phone business back into the PC business.
To me, this sounds like a reasonable move. The mobile market is a very consumer driven market and requires a lot of ground level push. Opinionated users and fan-boys galore. It is a riot down here. We thought it was down to Samsung and Apple, and suddenly there are now a host of Chinese manufacturers who are into the game – like Xiaomi. The Indian mobile manufacturers, who are still satisfying only the local market though, are no less formidable -like Micromax. Taiwan is not far behind with Asus.
Having seen Intel (from the outside though) and knowing it as an EDA customer, they are not the kind of people to roll their sleeves and get into this mud fight.
Not sure when Amazon will take the cue and get their Fire phone out too. This is not their market either, IMHO.
The year is 1995. It is past 9PM. Our typical tam-brahm household in Chennai has started ramping down for the day. Mom is clearing the kitchen and setting up for next day. Dad is finishing up watching the long form news (yes, the DD news that aired between 8:30-9PM ; there was a short form news between 730-745PM). I am generally vetti (vella, jobless, whatever) – a generally acceptable state for an engineering student in my second year of college.
I may look vetti, but excitement inside me is rising. The time is approaching. Half hour more. You ask for what? I will tell you what. INTERNET TIME.
I finish up my nightly glass of milk and run to my dads computer – a clunky X86/486. Dad had always been up-to-date on computers. For formality sakes, I run up to each family member in the family and tell them I am ‘going to the internet’ – not because they will miss me, but when I am ‘in there’, there will be no phones that will come in. *Pause for dramatic effect*. Yes, no incoming phone calls. And there was only one phone in the house – no mobiles then. So I basically cut off the primary communication channel to the home. On hindsight, I am thankful for family to have even let me do that!. Wow thats huge. If my son tells me, he is going to muck with my internet for a school project, I am not sure if I would be OK with that. (I would probably get him another Docomo stick or get myself one).
But I digress. I switch on the computer. (Yes, those were times when you switched on your computers only when you needed them). We had a choice. You could use the VSNL dialler or if you are adventurous, you can open up Windows Hyperterminal and could control the modem using the ATDT commands. The Zyxel modem used to be pretty much the same size as our cable modems now. I guess that has not really changed much.
Tariff:
Dang. It was expensive. I had a student account. 500 bucks a year. And I got a low speed terminal access account. My email was gcmouli@giasmda.vsnl.net.in. GIAS was the Gateway Internet Access Service. The only window from India to the world.
You get this screen and you fistpump. You made it. There were a fixed number of dial-up connections that could be opened up. So you keep trying. Most used keys were up-arrow and enter. Repeating the ATDT for redial. And then you would hear the screeching noise of the modem and then the busy tone. Up-arrow and enter. More screeching. And then you hear a different screeching sound. And a dramatic pause later, NO CARRIER. Dang. Up-arrow and return. Now you see why, when you see the above screen, you fistpump.
After we got into the internet, we had a grand list of 10 things you could do.
Three of them were most popular. Email. Lynx. UNIX prompt. And you typically went to the UNIX prompt to fire up IRC and chat with folks. There used to be a Madras Chat Room. There used to be a room with SVCE (our college) folks. Fun Fun.
But yeah, we got only a terminal.
And then entered Ranga, who wrote a software called BlueSpec (I think – dont fully remember the name of the software!), which could bring up a TCP-IP connection interface (that is what we used to call an internet with pictures :)) with a shell connection. You downloaded Mozilla (or got it from the free CD in PC Quest – remember??). You fired up BlueSpec only if you wanted to see pictures. It used to be terribly slow though. The shell connection was faster. So lynx it was. A site was considered good if it opened up clean in text and in a browser. That was the ‘responsive’ design of yesterday.
And then you would continuously be looking at the clock. You also had a limited number of hours – remember – 500 hours per year. So an hour a day would be comfortable – so that some time is remaining for ’emergency’ internet times.
“Its theft and its lazy, if you ask me.” — Johny Ive
This was the statement that Johny Ive when asked about Xiomi. There has been considerable discussion online about how the MIUI layout and design is very similar to iOS. And this is making Johny nervous and irritable. But is this the mature way of handling it? Isnt everything like that?
A person or a company typically invents (or produces) a concept or a product after a lot of hard work, and then it becomes a success. Then there are others who try and ‘copy’ or ’emulate’ if you will, to see the copied version can become a success too. There are times, when it does, and times when it does not.
Famously, Steve Jobs (once Ive’s employer) quoted the great artist Pablo PIcasso:
Good artists copy. Great artists steal.
If you read Steve’s biography and listen to some early tapes of his, you would see why he said that. His escapades around ‘stealing’ ideas from Bill Gates or more famously from Xerox PARC. Did the world cry fowl then? No. The capitalist philosophy is that, it does not matter if someone invented it. If someone can turn what was invented into what can make money, then that is success. A small town inventor who invented a great way to pump water from a borewell is considered a success in his neighbourhood. Someone who gets inspired by it, and makes it a production product and sells it to a hundred thousand farmers across India, becomes a resounding success.
See, Ive should understand that, just because you put in years of hard work into creating something very nice (and I agree, design wise, apple is probably way higher than any other company) does not mean that he can cloak it and keep it in his safe forever. It is a public product. This is a free world. He should probably feel proud that, there is another product which is considering his design as a role model and emulating it.
On a side note, Apple should probably feel good that, a company is atleast releasing this as something different (and is inspired by iOS) and not creating a fake iPhone and cheating others. By the way, that also happens. Come to India and see. You will hear talk about real iPhone vs Chine make iPhone.
And lastly, going by the track record of Apple, there will always be a fan-boy-club for Apple, who will always buy only Apple, even if they can get something that looks and feels exactly like Apple for half the price. So Apple, why do you worry? Or are you noticing the fan-boy-club dwinding? The numbers do not seem to say so.
I have been a big fan of BigBasket.com for quite a while now. While I love walking by the supermarket aisles and ‘discovering’ new products, bigbasket has taken away the stress of monthly grocery shopping for the family. To be fair, I should also disclose the fact that, we alternate buying weekly vegetables from bigbasket and our local HOPCOMS vegetable store (walking distance).
I had been thinking of a few things that bigbasket could introduce to make it even better. Having been a program manager (in a previous live at Microsoft), the first thing you do is to write a feature set / requirement spec. Here goes!
Weekly vegetable delivery. This is something similar to Amazon Fresh in select areas of the US. Most of India shops for veggies once a week, for a week. There is usually a preference on vegetables in most households. The vegetables could be a randomized set. (This is a common pain point when you buy veggies – what veggies did you buy last week – no one wants a repeat, leave alone several repeats). Ofcourse, no one minds repeats of favourite veggies (um, potato?). Send an email on Friday or Saturday listing a proposed selection of vegetables that would be delivered on Sunday. This would let the user to potentially tweak the order set. Guarantee freshness delivered at your door step, every weekend morning. I am sure you will get a bunch of customers asap.
Grocery is something that is fairly predictable too. Pulses, masalas, and other house hold goods are typically purchased at a roughly similar frequency. There is some infra that is already available with bigbasket for this – in the form of smart basket. I got this idea from looking at my own shopping analytics that is available at bigbasket right now. If I can see it, so can the system, and make a prediction.
Festivals and Diets: You can incorporate all kinds of smarts into this too. Suggest more ghee and sugar during festive seasons like Diwali maybe? Suggest baking accessories during Christmas maybe? How about incorporating your diet plan into this as well? If you get broccoli every week, would you throw it away? Always suggest low sodium salt?
Recipes: Hey ! You are throwing in a bunch of veggies, and you know the other groceries that you have delivered recently, why cant you put together 2 recipes per week using these ingredients. Simple pictorial ones. Easy to understand, and prepare. Even better, add one or two more exotic ingredients (for free), which in conjunction with the veggies delivered and the groceries that you recently delivered, would make a super exotic meal. This is marketing for those two exotic ingredients. If they like this recipe, now, you have a regular customer for 2 more of your offerings.
Secret box: There are a few start-ups in the US that are attempting this now. For a monthly subscription, they will deliver a monthly surprise box containing cosmetics or snacks, or other similar consumable stuff. This is a great marketing tie-up opportunity with partners. Drop in a couple of satchets of the newest flavour of Saffola Oats – carefully concealed in some secret wrapping of course (to enhance the interest) for free with your delivery. Notice the delight in the customers attitude. You can also link this line item with the previous (recipe) for even more customer delight goodness.
Delivery: What if the customer does not really want you to deliver home? Get up early on a sunday morning to a doorbell? Really? I bet the idea of bigbasket kiosks are already running the rounds inside your org now. You should, and yes, I mean, you should, introduce kiosks for ordering and taking delivery of orders. Best place for these kiosks for the yuppie crowd would be malls and IT parks.
Well to paraphrase ‘Sound of Music’, these are a few of my favourite things. I would love Big basket to come up with these features. And I would be the first one to trial these out !! And well, yeah, to be fair, thanks BigBasket for letting me do some PM stuff that I had not done in quite a while.
Based on reports from pilots flying over the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, glare from the plant’s massive heliostat mirror array has obstructed the vision of some pilots, presenting a potential hazard for aircrafts flying overhead.
Solar plants are super helpful in adding renewable energy to society, I hope they do something about the glare for the sake of airline safety.
