It was an April evening last summer though I don’t remember the day or the date. Summer was at its peak and I was sipping a cup of hot tea early in the morning checking mail on the iPad after I got through the newspapers. I got a response to one of the stories that was filed by one of our Content Editors. The response was not about the story but a straight lecture to me how he found our flagship portal, www.commodityonline.com, very useful but very complicated. He had to struggle to find many stories, sections and other details. ‘If you can, he urged in the mail, please make it more useful to people like me because I completely rely on your site for Commodity insights.’ I came to the office after an hour and started soul searching if we could do anything for this person. I went through comments and feedback by others and found at least two more people expressing similar views. There could be many adjusting to the complications. The reason that we had too much content and too less space to display was because our site got evolved over a period of time with new sections, new additions without evolving the basic design. We were putting more stuff into an already cramped space. That day I started my research on how we can present the information, data and the flow of insights in a way that an old man who wrote to me can easily grasp and also how a person with very little knowledge of English could grab. Same evening, I got into Fluid UI, a browser based wire framing and prototyping tool used primarily for mobile touch interfaces. Instead of having a designer working for me under my directions, I got myself into solving the real life problems faced by our current users getting into their shoes and pricking myself with problems without any solutions in sight. For the next 15 days, I drew and trashed at least 500 different prototypes but could not find one that could match what I envisaged as a killer product. Summer was at its peak and I started sitting late to find out a solution. I realized late evening time was better suited to extract more out of me and gradually this got extended to midnight. The iMac started heating up because it got overloaded with huge images and 18 hours of continuous effort. In late May with temperature touching 46 to 48 degree, I got a break in the price display page. It is easy to conceptualize but then you also have to make sure your programmer can code it. Additionally, if at all such a design is possible or not in real life. Also need to ensure all browsers and OS can adjust it. It also need to be fluid so that I can do away with the wap version and give a full version in the mobile platform itself. It also needs to be adjusting to machines like iPads. I searched through visitor behavior to learn where they remain the most. I realized they were stickier to the pricing part than the text part. The lacuna here was the missing link between the price and the related stories and insights. We wanted to plug this loophole first. I wanted the fresh idea to be drawn by a fresh mind. So I entrusted the work to a fresh designer interning with us. Thankfully our senior designer in the tech team came handy to her. In the next seven to eight months, the struggle continued. Gradually, the prototypes were coded and became reality. The idea of having infographics for language neutrality prompted us to put images to commodity names. We put the Commodity prices in bigger fonts and in a more appealing manner and linked everything that is related to the particular commodity or name within the page itself. This will save the person who emailed me the task of searching for his desired news and information. The other issue was to fix the registration page problems. More than a hundred people register for our services every day and many of them find the registration process tough. This is because we have cut the dummy registrations by adding many features. This is being eased in design but not security. Users who want to register with us will have to go through rigorous process. This is being done to cut down non-serious registrants. Since we do not make any cold calling, we need to ensure each person who registers with us gets a call within 2 hours. This new page will be launched shortly. This week, we launched the beta version which is for you to see and comment. It will take a month for us to fix the bugs and complete it and go on to the next idea. For users who were used to our old design will take a little time to come into terms with the new one. But I am sure you will like it. Thank you everyone for your feedback and continue to write to us.
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