Anuradha Sridharan

It feels like a dream. We returned from a magical vacation to a serene, beautiful place named Swaswara . In performance appraisals, you would have come across the term "Exceeds expectations". This place has definitely surpassed the high expectations that we had set before the vacation. Our idea of a vacation this time was to just take time out for ourselves and spend more time together in a quiet place, away from city life. Having been to Coconut Lagoon , Spice Village and Marari Beach resorts, we have become a loyal customer of CGH Earth properties. The perfect locations, sumptuous food and lots of activity within their property makes the trips so memorable that you keep revisiting those memories. When we were browsing through their site, we stumbled upon Swaswara and found to be a unique resort by itself. Being the off season, we got a very sweet deal for our 5 day stay. After working out the logistics, we knew the trip is going to be excellent. We took the early mornin...

 My previous trip to Madikeri/Coorg 2 years ago was mainly due to the fact that we wanted to go on a drive some place over the weekend. But when hubby put forth the idea of a long break, Coorg came to our minds instantly. The main purpose of this trip was just to do nothing. What better place than Linger which claims the same phrase as their tag line - "DO NOTHING"! While hubby decided to stay there for 5 nights, I planned to join him a little later since I didn't want to exhaust all my leave days on this trip (we followed it with another amazing trip, watch out for the next post!). Having booked a KSRTC to Bhagamandala, the challenge was to figure out where the Mysore Road Satellite bus station was. It turned out to be an easy task and I reached the bus stand 2 hours earlier than the departure time. The clean bus station with good seating facility and the few magazines that I picked up from the nearby stall helped me pass the 2 hours quickly. The bus reached my dest...

I couldn't believe this morning when I opened my blog URL after several weeks and realized that I haven't written a single word in the past 3 months. The irony is that the last blog post was on power of distractions while I was happily getting distracted with 2 games that I was hooked onto for the past two months. For those who follow my tweets, you would have guessed by now that I'm referring to Zynga's Farmville and Cafe World. Ever since I started working with Computers, I never was into any form of gaming (except for Roadrash for a while during college days). When my brothers introduced me to the world of social gaming, it immediately caught my interest and I started playing them every night after coming back from work. These games were even more fun to play, with hubby and brothers also playing enthusiastically. Weekends were busy with planting new crops that harvest and cooking dishes that get done in a few hours. What took 4-5 months for my brothers, I reached ...

The past six months have been keeping me a lot busy, thanks to a new job. There is also a feeling of restlessness and I feel distracted most of the times. I was not sure if the restlessness is leading to distraction or vice-versa. Last weekend, I sat for 4 hours straight and finished reading a book "Keep off the grass" by Karan Bajaj (review to follow soon). It felt so much better to focus on a single task at hand for a stretch with no distractions whatsoever. But such un-distracted times have become a rare and precious entity these days. While pursuing PGSEM, such focused activities were common - 90 minutes of focused attention on interesting lectures, reading a 18 page HBR case study at a stretch for 2 hours or working on a presentation deck with project partners, discussing on skype. I realized the reason I was feeling restless was that I was getting distracted, almost all the time these days. Constant interruptions over phone (both landline and mobile), multiple context...

2010 seems to be zooming past at a speed which I'm trying to comprehend. With 5 months already gone in a jiffy, I wonder how the time had flown by. Being a person who loves to travel, it didn't take me too long to figure out that I haven't traveled anywhere for leisure in these 5 months. So hubby and I decided to drive down to Wayanad in the last weekend of May. Although we had visited Wayanad in 2007 ( Vythiri to be specific), we didn't go around anywhere, thanks to the monsoons. After a quick browsing through the review sites, we finalized our stay with Thirunelli Agraharam cottages. The owner of the cottages, Mr.Sebastian had sent us a detailed route from Bangalore which was very helpful. Getting up early on a Saturday morning could have only been made possible, if we are traveling somewhere. It was a smooth drive on Mysore Road and we stopped for breakfast at Kamat (where else!!). After Srirangapatna, the route got exciting as we had to find our way to Hunsur. T...

At the beginning of this month, I decided to get the BMTC monthly bus pass since it had become a big pain to carry enough change every morning. On 4th May evening, I asked the bus conductor of a Volvo to give me the bus pass and I paid him Rs.1250. It was a big relief on 5th morning when I was leaving for work. "I don't have to carry 10s or coins. I can switch buses easily without any problem", I thought to myself. As I was about to leave my home, I quickly looked at the bus pass and there was a mention of ID card. I quickly went to my cupboard and grabbed my PAN card. Without much waiting time, I boarded a Volvo to work. When the conductor asked me to show the bus pass, I happily showed the pass as well as my PAN card. She stared at them for a while and then said "This is not a valid ID card. This pass is invalid". I looked at her in disbelief and replied "PAN card is a valid ID proof just like driving license". There were other passengers overheari...

Having touched upon the idea of integrating user behavior into the product design in the previous post, let me explore further on this topic. One of the approaches that I have found to be very useful is this idea of "user personas". By trying to build a persona, one gets to understand the intricacies of the user behavior. This provides valuable inputs that can be fed into the product design. A user persona is a mechanism to understand the potential users of your product or service. The idea of a persona derives more from the behavioral and psychographic aspects of the users. In order to build a user persona, explore the following questions: * Who is my customer? * Where does he live? * What does his typical day look like? * Whom does he interact with on a typical day? * What motivates him to do something? * What irritates him the most? * What is his typical personality? * Is he intrinsically or extrinsically motivated? * Under what circumstances does he feel t...