Category Archives: Technology

TRAI’s new SMS guidelines are a step in the wrong direction

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Starting today, TRAI has started enforcing new guidelines with the intention of stopping the menace of “promotional” SMS, or SMS spam. No promotional SMS can be sent to any user who is on the DND list, and there are hefty fines for violations. Everyone is rejoicing the death of SMS spam, but this is a huge backward step for India – because along with SMS spam, TRAI has also outlawed the sending of automated SMS to users with their permission. That’s right: there is no way for a company X to send a status update to user Y even if the user Y desperately wants such updates, and even if he’s willing to give it in writing.

Don’t get me wrong. I hate unsolicited SMS messages as much as you do. But what TRAI has done is throw out the baby with the bathwater.

If I book a ticket on http://BookMyShow.com, I used to get an SMS confirmation. I could use that SMS at the theatre to pick up my ticket. Now? Gone. If a doctor answers an important patient question on http://bharathealth.com, the patient would get an SMS with the doctor’s answer (so that they get the answer immediately, and not have to wait until they log in to the site next time). This is a service that the patients love, and they start complaining as soon as the SMS service stops working. Now? It’s illegal. The fact that the receiver of the SMS actually wants it does not matter. SMS from http://Flipkart.com telling me where my book has reached – Gone. SMS updates that tell me whether my waitlisted Indian Railways ticket’s status has gotten confirmed – Gone.

Here are the sordid details as I understand them:

Automated SMS can be divided up into two categories: promotional/bulk SMS, and transactional SMS. Bulk SMS is where you’re sending the same SMS to a large number of recipients (e.g. a daily stock tip would be in this category). Transactional SMS is when you’re sending different sms updates/alerts/messages to different customers (e.g. an sms update from your bank immediately after a high value transaction on your credit card).

According to the new regulations, here is my understanding of the effects:

  • Users can sign up for a full DND (in which you don’t get any bulk SMS), or a partial DND, where you can opt in to receive bulk sms in certain categories. There are 7 such categories: 1: Banking/Insurance/Finance, 2: Real Estate, 3: Education, 4: Health, 5: Consumer Goods, Automobiles, 6: Communications/Broadcasting/Entertainment/IT, 7: Tourism & Leisure
  • Any user signin up for partial DND is pretty much asking the world of spammers (in that category) to start spamming him/her. Imagine – the partial DND list will be a public available list of people who have indicated an interest in a particular category and cannot complian if you spam them. A marketer’s (aka spammer’s) dream. As we say in Hindi, this is pretty much aa bail mujhe maar.
  • For DND users, transactional SMS can be sent only by: Banks, Financial Institutions, Insurance Companies, Credit Card Companies, Railways or Airline companies, and registered Educational Institutions. That’s it. No one else can send any SMS to a user signed up for DND.
  • Everybody else will essentially be treated as a telemarketer and be fined heavily in case of DND violations.

So, imagine you provide stock tips via SMS to users you have opted in to your service (what the heck, they’re even paying you for it). Under the new regulations:

  • No, you are not a Financial Institution just because you’re providing finance information. So you can’t send transactional
  • Under the new regulations, you cannot send your SMS to any user on the DND.
  • Your only hope is to convince that user to sign up for a partial-DND and opt in to receive messages for category #1: banking/insurance/finance. I would assume that most users who’ve signed up for DND will be wary of opening themselves up to telemarketing by going the partial DND route.

Follow a discussion of this question on Quora for more.

Also see Sagar Bedmutha’s post on pluggd.in on this topic.

Why everyone in the technology business should use a touch interface for at least a week

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You don’t know what touch is, until you’ve used it.

I’ve been using a touch based mobile phone (an HTC Hero, running Android 1.5) for the last 4 or 5 days, and I’m convinced that everyone who is in the technology space must use a touch based device as one of their primary devices for at least a week.

I’m not asking you to switch to an iPad permanently. I’m not saying that the iPhone is better than your Nokia or your Blackberry. I’m not saying that touch will kill the keyboard. All I am saying is that touch is different, and the only way to really understand it is to use it for a while. After you’ve understood touch, you can go back to your favourite input interface. But remember, that if you’re in the business of technology, touch will be a major part of the lives of a major part of your customer-base in the foreseeable future – and it’s different enough that for every product you put out, you must ask yourself, how will this appear on a touch based device.

Why?

Here are some reasons:

Touch is different

Yes, in theory, I knew that interacting with a program using a touch based device is very different from interacting with it using a mouse and a keyboard. I already knew these things:

  • Fingers are fatter than mouse pointers, and hence, all buttons need to be fatter
  • Touch allows various new ways of interacting–like fling, and drag, and long-press

However, it is only after using the phone myself for day-to-day tasks that I realized that there are a hundred little things that make things different. For example:

  • Most of the time, there is no keyboard. Which means that all your shortcut keys are gone. No <Del> to delete something, no Ctrl-C to copy, and no Ctrl-A to select all.
  • There is no good way you can move your cursor to the middle of a sentence. So if you typed Naavin insted of Navin by mistake, normally you would simply take your cursor after the second a and then hit backspace. Guess what… there is no back arrow, and tapping on the screen to make your cursor go to spot just after the second a is almost impossible. The only way is to backspace all the way and re-type everything.
  • The long-press is equivalent to the context menu in Windows/Linux (i.e. the menu you get when you right click the mouse on some item). Well, by definition, long-press takes a long time, and it painful enough that I simply avoid it and try to find alternative ways of doing things.
  • When you’re interacting with the screen, your finger is actually covering the screen. This makes some things more difficult.
  • There is no that allows you to skip to the next field when filling out a form. To get around this, some apps add a “Next” key to the keyboard when you’re filling out forms. You don’t realize how important this key is, until you’ve filled some forms and have to go to the next field by hiding the keyboard, scrolling and selecting the next field.

There’s a whole bunch of tiny issues like these that can completely kill a user experience unless the app has been specifically designed for the touch interface, by someone who actually uses a touch interface (as opposed to someone who’s just imagining the touch interface).

Touch will be a major part of your life

In spite of all the issues I pointed out above, I’m convinced that touch is a very intuitive interface, and is a huge improvement over mouse+keyboard for a large number of applications. Enough has been written about this on the web, so I will not repeat those arguments here. If you’ve not heard those arguments before, you should befriend Google.

But the point is that whether you like it or not, a major fraction of your customers/consumers will be using touch to consume your content. So, get with the program.

It’s not just about mobile apps

I somehow had this vague notion that the people who really need to spend time understanding touch are those who are building iPhone or Android apps. Then, while using my device, I realized that I was visiting a lot of vanilla websites using my mobile phone browser. And some of those sites sucked.

So, even if you’re not a mobile app developer, you still need to worry about touch. If you have any website out there, if you’ve put out any content on the web, you should spend some time in understanding how your content shows up on touch devices.

And, yes, this even applies to you if you don’t have anything really to do with the UI of whatever it is that you’re working on. The UI is the only thing about your product that the end user (the person who’s paying) interacts with. So better make sure you take an interest in that.

I said “primary device” and “1 week”

That’s right. You need to use a touch device as one of your primary devices for about a week before you “get” some of these issues. You need to view your content, or use your app, using that device to really understand.

I can count a long list of friends who played with a touch based device for about 15 minutes (mostly playing some games, and a photo album) before deciding that they’ve seen enough. But, good UI is about deciding which inconveniences does the user get used to over time, and which ones continue to remain a pain. And the only way you’ll know that is by going through it yourself.

How can the Chinese use computers, since their language contains so many characters?

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Nàng, Image via Wikipedia

The Straight Dope tries to answer the question “How can the Chinese use computers, since their language contains so many characters?” and gives a very fascinating insight into the Chinese language:

(3) Enter the syllable into the computer phonetically using Roman (i.e., our) letters. This takes up to six keystrokes plus, in some programs, one more keystroke for the tone. Typically this pops up a menu of possible characters, six characters or so at a time.

(4) Page through the characters looking for the one you want. With 50,000 possible written syllables but only a few hundred possible spoken ones, each spoken syllable can have as many as 131 different meanings (average: 17), each with its own character. You could be paging quite a while, and you still might not find the character you want–no program includes all 50,000. (Answer to obvious question: in speech you figure out the meaning from the context. Never let your attention wander during a Chinese conversation.)

After reading the whole article I am amazed at how the Chinese have managed to be so computer literate!

Our own problems with Indian languages are similar, and if you have any interest in entering Indic languages into a computer, you should check out Lipikaar.com which is trying to use a similar technique.

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