Good Slides on Usability Testing – How to make it quick and cheap

via slideshare.net

Many times we want to do a quick check on the usability aspects of product features. But the moment we approach the UED team, they talk about elaborate testing and probably estimate few weeks of effort.

The above slides provide a good overview of how we can go about doing Usability Tests quickly and cheap, just to

Posted via web from All Things Product Management

Do You Really Need a Deadline? | Edge of Chaos | Agile Development Blog

via targetprocess.com

Nice post from the targetprocess guys.

Many times i used to wonder what are we up against in most of the products that i had handled, especially if there are no external commitments (such as marketing events, conferences etc.,)

What if i do not make a release today and instead make it tomorrow. Things are not going to break loose and heaven is not going to come down. It is just that if i make the release today, in someones status report (i meant my boss, boss’s boss and so on) it will look nice.

But at the end, no one bother to very the real metric… ie Revenue / Profit / Market Share etc., did it went up / down.

Pretty sad that we still race against time to meet some deadline. At the end, the question is do you have a choice.

But then very ‘choice’ is upto you and you only. It is you who have to decide on the ‘choice’

Posted via web from All Things Product Management

Product management on a shoestring budget

via entrepreneur.venturebeat.com

Nice collection of tools that can be used by product managers working for start-ups.

I really liked the ‘UserVoice’ product that allows one to crowd source ideas / issues as well as to prioritize requirements.

But when i searched around i could also see ‘GetSatisfaction’ which is sort of clean and when the getsatisfaction plug-in is used in a company’s website, it just allows one to enter their issues / ideas / praises.

Posted via web from All Things Product Management

60+ Useful Adobe AIR Applications You Should Know | Tools

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/60-useful-adobe-air-applications-you-should-know/

Very good collection of products developed using Adobe AIR framework. It looks like the trend is to create smaller products that addresses a small problem, instead of trying to develop bigger products that tries (yes, bigger product can only try to address)

Posted via web from All Things Product Management

Good Slides on ‘Lean Startup Lessons

via slideshare.net

Start-ups are all about making things happen as quickly as possible. These slides re-emphasis those points.

Posted via web from All Things Product Management

Nice Informal Presentation Style

via blogs.zappos.com

Many time i used to wonder if i can ‘truely’ get rid of powerpoint slides for presentations. But was never sure of how my idea / thought process would get accepted. This gives presentation by Jeff Bezos re-assure that the old way of doing thing is still powerful and makes the point.

Posted via web from All Things Product Management

It has been a long time…

It has been a long time since i had spent some quality time to post some thing that is useful to the Product Management community. Been in a product manger role for close to 6 years, means definitely there is something to share with the ever-willing-to-learn PM community. Will start with something like 'Product Roadmap 101' in the coming days.

Apologies to those of you who had visited this site in the past and found nothing. But moving forward will keep my blog updated as often as possible. And that is a PROMISE.

I have been some what active in the twitter world and if you would like to follow me, you can do the same my visiting twitter.com/srinibs

Posted via email from All Things Product Management

Checking out Posterous

This is a test post for publishing at posterous

Srini

Posted via email from Everyday Product Management

Windows Live Writer – Update

I just downloaded and installed the Beta version of Windows Live Writer 1.0. The interface had improved a lot and it look a lot cleaner. The installation was quick and i was able to configure my blog in wordpress effortlessly.

Due to increased work pressure and family commitments i was not able to continue my contribution to this blog. But moving forward i am hoping that i will be able to write at least 2 posts per week on some thing interesting.

UI Design – Representing Mandatory Fields ?

Currently, I am into revamping the UI of a retail product. The current version of the product is a based on client-sever architecture and has some watt inconsistent look and feel. Hence, I am into defining UI guidelines to bring about the much required consistency and to make it easy to learn (ie users must be able to self-learn the functionality without much help and without referring to on-line help)

One of the things on which we (I mean the team) are struck is how to visually represent mandatory field. Visual representation of mandatory fields is important because, if the user fails to define values for a mandatory field he will end up seeing pop-up error messages. This becomes even more cumbersome when the user leave more than one mandatory fields, in such a case multiple pop-up may have to be displayed.

Before we jump into the options let us look at how they are represented in products like SAP and Great Plains:

In SAP, the mandatory field is represented by a small tick mark inside the field. The good thing about SAP is the the tick mark disappears when a value is entered.

Whereas in Great Plains, the same is represented  as given in the image below ie the field labels are marked in ‘Red’ color and in italics:

Options such as making the field label ‘Bold‘ or  underlining the field label or using an asterisk at the end of label are some of choice we looked at. We even thought of giving a different color for the field (such as the outline or background). However, we are yet to arrive at a decision. My only concern about playing with the font properties of the field label spoil the look and feel. Having a tick mark similar to SAP is out of question as I am not sure if the same can be achieved using the technology used for developing the product

Any one encountered such a situation and any suggestions on what is a good way to represent mandatory fields’?