Power of distractions

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 switches, my increased interest towards twitter updates, emails for which people expect responses almost the next minute and so on. Being a GTD follower, I capture almost all the thoughts and commitments that come to my mind into my trusted system. That helps me to reduce any chances of missing commitments that I need to work on. But this practice of collecting and processing these thoughts alone doesn't seem to suffice. Information and new work keeps flowing into my collection box all the time. Is it that I have started to juggle multiple focus areas? No way, since I definitely had much more commitments and projects six months ago and I always consider myself to be a better multi-tasker.

"Distractions" has become the one enemy that I need to attack in order to feel much more productive in my day-to-day activities. Although it cannot be defeated in a day, I have started to take a few simple steps to defeat this enemy:

- No Internet access for one day during the weekend (either Saturday or Sunday).
- Facebook access once a day (it has got boring these days, with Farmville updates taking much of the space)
- Orkut access once in three days (seems none of my friends in orkut are active these days, moved to Facebook perhaps!)
- Personal mails (Yahoo! / Gmail) access once a day
- Hiding the dock on my Mac so I don't get to see new mail updates while I'm focusing at work
- Mute my TV when advertisements start to show up while watching a movie or a TV show (Used to constantly change the channels with remote)
- Tracking twitter updates a few times a day (not check as and when new tweets keep coming) - Need to reduce from a few times to once a day
- When new web links are shared by friends or colleagues through email, chat or tweets, I used to check them almost immediately or have them open in my browser. So at the end of the day, I would have around 10-15 browser tabs open, with a few of them read, some more half read and the rest not read yet. Now I have started to bookmark them and add a tag "Read & Review". I later come back to such links and view a few of them at a time.

Any other suggestions?

PS: I typed this post, with no distractions whatsoever :-)

Drive to North Wayanad

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. The sun was at its scorching peak but the trees on both sides of the road provided some respite. Once we spotted the banner indicating Rajiv Gandhi National Park, we were very excited, hoping we could see some animals inside the sanctuary. There are a few restrictions while driving through the park - 30 km/hr speed limit, no honking, no music and no parking. Though we followed these restrictions which helped us to admire nature's pristine  beauty, there were others who seemed to be in a hurry and speeding past the road. We spotted deers, monkeys and a couple of elephants. By the time we crossed the park and entered Kerala border, it was past 1 PM. The border town of Kutta didn't have any good places to eat. So we called up the hotel manager and asked him if lunch would be available in the resort.

This was definitely one of the best typical Kerala lunches we've ever had. After a long drive and a sumptuous lunch, we took a nice siesta. When we planned our trip, we were expecting Wayanad to have a cool and pleasant weather. It was as hot as Bangalore.

The manager gave us a few pamphlets indicating the places to visit. Though we would have loved to drive down to all the places, time was definitely a constraint (the weather as well).  We went to Thirunelli temple (just a km away from the resort) and Kuruva islands. If only the weather wasn't that hot and sultry, we could have enjoyed the walk inside Kuruva islands. We felt very exhausted after the long walk in the sun. We were planning to go to Banasurasagar dam but we missed the route and ended up coming towards Kutta. After having a late lunch in a small local eatery, we headed back to the resort.

With crispy onion pakodas and hot tea, we spent the rest of the evening, playing carroms and reading a novel.After breakfast and a long chat with Mr.Sebastian on Monday, we headed back to Bangalore. The monsoon clouds were just looming dark on top of the Brahmagiri mountains when we bid goodbye to Wayanad.

Getting a BMTC monthly bus pass

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 overhearing this conversation. One of the passengers showed me a new ID card and said that this is the ID card we are supposed to carry and it's issued by BMTC. Now how the hell am I supposed to know that? I don't see any specific need to carry another ID card. Thankfully he also gave a tip that this ID card is available in Shanti Nagar Bus depot only till 6th of every month. Or else I need to go to Majestic to get this ID card. None of these make sense to me. Anyway, the next day, I went to Shanti Nagar bus depot and purchased the ID card. This trip took me more than an hour. Such a waste of time and energy!

1) Why should we get another ID card? Why doesn't BMTC allow either PAN card, driving license or voter's ID card?
2) Why doesn't the conductor check if the commuter already has this so-called BMTC ID card before issuing the monthly pass?
3) Why can't the conductors carry the fresh ID card which commuters can purchase while purchasing the monthly pass and then they can apply the stamp?
4) Why do they issue the ID cards only till 6th of every month in Shanti Nagar bus depot?
5) Why should one go all the way to Majestic bus stand just to get this ID card after 6th?

If BMTC wants more and more people to take public transport, they should make things easily accessible. Will they ponder over these 5 questions and make this bus pass purchasing process simpler for commuters?

Update: (based on Times of India article dated 6th June 2010)
 BMTC has introduced a friendly pass which you can purchase directly from the bus conductor. You can use any ID card like driver's license, passport, voter's ID card etc. With this new pass, all the five questions I raised have been answered. Kudos to BMTC!!!

http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Scripting/ArticleWin.asp?From=Archive&Source=Page&Skin=TOINEW&BaseHref=TOIBG/2010/06/02&PageLabel=3&EntityId=Ar00301&ViewMode=HTML&GZ=T

User Personas

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 the pain point that you are trying to solve?
* What are the after-effects when he faces the pain point that you are trying to solve?

It helps if you can build a story around this user by giving a fictitious name and articulating his environment. You can also come up with hand sketches and drawings to illustrate the personality of the user of your product idea. This can provide useful and interesting inputs to your design and engineering teams.

If your product or service is catered to different market segments, build a user persona that represents each of these segments. Highlight the difference in the behaviors of these different users.

The best time to take up this persona building activity is just after you are done with segmentation of your market and just before you formulate the product strategy. With segmentation in place, you will exactly know which markets to target and depending on the target segments, whether the personas will be different. After you have the personas clearly defined, it will be much more easier to think about your product roadmap and the needs you will address for your target segments.

For more information on personas, check out these blogs:
http://www.buyerpersona.com/2010/05/how-kristine-developed-a-great-buyer-persona.html
http://carsonified.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/personas_final_b.jpg
http://bonfireda.com/docs/The-Power-of-the-Persona.pdf
http://www.savvyb2bmarketing.com/blog/entry/580831/getting-back-to-the-roots-of-buyer-personas-interview-with-tony-zambito-of-goal-centric

User behavior and product design

I use a Yahoo! mail account for my personal emails and I have subscriptions to many group emails. Over the past few months, my mailbox has been overflowing with many unread emails as I tend to scroll through the list and read only the most important ones at the beginning of my day. I have unsubscribed from many group lists to keep the incoming information under control. However there are some groups in which I might get a few important messages occasionally which I do not want to miss out. So I decided to create a few filters and organize my inbox.

This is exactly THE time in the lifecycle of product-user interaction when one starts to think about filters in a mail product - when there is a bunch of unread mails and the user feels that it is getting unmanageable and wants to get organized; not when the time he/she creates a new mail account and immediately starts to create filters.

Coming back to my problem, I located the "Filter emails like this" and created a filter. So far, so good. But to my utter disbelief, I couldn't see the "run filter" or similar such option. I wondered if this feature was hidden somewhere that it wasn't evident to me. After googling for a bit, I found out that such a feature doesn't exist in Yahoo! mail. Disappointed with the lack of this feature, I dropped the effort of organizing my inbox.

This experience triggered a thought process of how one should go about integrating user behavior into the product design. Before designing a product's feature or even a minor functionality, ask yourself these questions -
1. When will my user explore this specific functionality?
2. What are the circumstances under which this particular feature will be used?
3. What is the motivation factor that will enable the user to try out this feature?

Evaluate the physical circumstances (place of usage), the psychological state of the users (positive or negative frame of mind) and the expected outcome (not only from a product point of view but also from the user's intended action).

More to follow on this topic.