Music Websites’ Comparison - UX Analysis

The Information Architecture

For Spotify the Information Architecture is Minimalistic with very few options to choose from - Going easy on user and reducing the cognitive load of the user with quick options to choose from

Menu options are presented vertically in the top left of the screen Which is also positively the most viewed portion of any online site by maximum users based on historic eye tracking studies

In Gaana the Information Architecture is spanned wider with many options to choose from.

Menu options are presented horizontally with more than Seven options to choose.

Brand Language

In Spotify, the user specific keyword is the Third option - Your Library

In Gaana, the user specific keyword is placed last in the list of left to right options - My Music

In this case Gaana is better because it is using the USER’s Context - The user’s mental model of - “My Music” which sounds more personal than - “Your Library” because the word “your” is in second person context whereas “my” is first person.

Commercials

The commercial part is a bit too highlighted in Gaana with “Go Ad Free” and “Gaana Plus” are associated with Gaana’s Brand Red Color depicting continuity and leading the Eye Queue to the commercial aspect.

Spotify on the other hand goes easy on the user with a single word - “Premium” suggesting user discretion and not being too pushy on the commercials.

Post Login

Spotify greets the user with a “Good Evening” or a “Good Morning” depending on the time of the day based on the geopositioning of the user. This experience is a welcome gesture for any user and it does make one feel good. In Gaana this welcome greeting is missing.

Spotify additionally pampers the user by displaying the user’s name as well as display pic icon (if added) Gaana on the other hand only shows the icon

Color Theme

Gaana’s two colored Theme of Red and White looks neat

Gaana also offers users; dark or light theme to choose from with the default theme being the light theme.

Spotify’s Dark default theme in Black and white looks drab and the Green color of the brand is missing in the default theme. The user interface does not display theme change options readily however the default dark theme promotes battery saving for mobile interfaces.

Signup

Spotify seems to be promoting Single Sign-on by placing multiple options first

Here Spotify offers easy to the user providing multiple options like Facebook, Apple, Google and Mobile

This approach enhances the user experience by offering the extremely easy to use options first and makes the user journey a cakewalk

Unlike Gaana which suggests user mobile or email based login first and then offers Single sign-on as an alternative. Gaana misses on offering easy login to apple users!

All about Graphics and Image File Formats

All about Graphics and Image File Formats

Graphics are broadly classified in to Raster or Vector Graphics. Raster Graphics are in the form of Bitmap Graphics wherein each pixel would have a different color and eventually a collection of pixels would compose into any graphic form that it would shape into.

Raster or Bitmap graphics are used in Photographs or color intensive applications.

Vector Graphics are essentially geometric shapes in an outline with color filled in to it.

On expanding a vector graphic the geometric shape is reconstructed and the fill color or Vignette/Gradient is refilled in to it. Here the computer only stores the geometric shape related info and the color info and hence the file sizes of these applications are lighter also there is no pixel tearing on expanding any image constructed using Vector Graphics.

Vector Graphics are used in Applications like CorelDraw or Adobe Illustrator and Line art Graphics are created is 3D rendering software like AutoCAD and other Civil Engineering and Architecture related software.

For Raster Graphics most common Web File formats like GIF, PNG, and JPEG are used.

GIF - Graphic Interchange Format is a proprietary file format which stores color in the form of Indexed Colors. Index color is a 8 Bit File format containing the ability to store up to 256 colors with the addition of one of the 256 colors allowed to be completely transparent.

PNG - Portable Network Graphics was an unpatented and improved file format developed to replace GIF file format. PNGs support 8 Bit as well as 24 Bit File formats. The 8-Bit format supports up to 256 colors and one transparent color allowed just as the GIF file format.

PNG supports palette-based images with palettes of 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA colors

Here PNG supports Alpha Transparency with 256 shades of grey giving you a gradient semitransparent image.

Unofficially, the initials PNG stood for the recursive acronym "PNG's not GIF"

- Above line is an excerpt from Wikipedia's PNG Article

Last but not the least JPEG - which is the Joint Photographic Engineering Group or JPG in short is a file format supporting 24 Bit Images primarily designed for Photographic images. It stores and recreates color information in an extremely efficient manner.

The human eye perceives color based on its adjacent color. Hence JPEG Devised a compression algorithm of rendering color in photographic images in such a manner that during compression it actually deletes alternate lines of color and renders/recreates this line of color on its own and even when images are stretched  to a certain extent, it manages to reduce the image file size and still recreates the same image without any artifacts and which is pretty close to the original image.

In the next article I will explain more about - "Display Colors, Color Modes and Color Spaces"

The things I learnt from Indigo Consulting - Chapter 1 - Beginning of a New Era

Chapter 1 - Beginning of a New Era

I was a Graphic Designer, Web Designer, UI Designer and anything related to design and designing until I joined Indigo Consulting.

It all started with Devang Naik

Being a maharashtrian myself I thought... rather I was gut sure that this guy from HR must be a Marathi speaking one however to my greatest surprise he turned out to be a gujju guy ( My perception back then was people with the Naik surname are only Maharashtrians).

I used to stay at Andheri West and most of the job opportunities used to come from Andheri East so when I received a call from Devang for a job opportunity in Lower Parel…. I was already skeptical. His junior had already called me and she tried convincing me but I had turned it down.

Now when I look back and reflect those moments... I think of myself as a true snob….

and just look at the outright audacity I had (considering I had no job in hand at that juncture) to tell Devang that "I understand it is a good opportunity and I don’t disagree that your company might serve as a very good learning curve however it is too far for me to travel from Andheri to Lower Parel and I would rather like to skip it".

I should appreciate the patience and perseverance of our man - Devang... he kept persuading me and he told me that there is nothing to lose in just appearing for an interview. His final closing was something like this - "do you already have an offer in hand" to which I candidly replied  "no" then he said "Ek bar aake dekho". Just come over once and give it a shot...

I came to the office at Lower Parel West in Sun-mill compound. At first glance I like the peculiarly designed office probably made to look like an Ad Agency. it was a Tin Themed setting with Tin / aluminium Sheets with texture/ pattern seen in Mumbai local train’s Flooring used as cubicle partitions and rest of it made in glass. The Tall height of this Industrial Gala was smartly divided into Mezzanine partitions which gave it a two storeys look.

My First round was taken by Deepak Shrivastava who asked me HTML and CSS questions and all questions answered like rapid fire round. My interview with him finished in less than 5 mins and he moved out of the cabin.

Even though I knew my answers were right still the first round was over so quickly and this guy moved out so quickly hence I was worried… probably something was wrong…

Then Jyoti mam came and she asked me her bit of questions and I answered all of them and she concluded that I was selected and asked me when could I join. I was thrilled excited and happy to feel a prospective part of such a hep looking office. I was handed over the offer letter in a short while and I joined Indigo Consulting in the next two days!!

To be continued in the Next Chapter

Chapter 2 - Life at Indigo Consulting….

Guru Purnima Special !!!

 Guru Purnima Special !!!

Guru Bramha Guru Vishno Guru Devo Maheshwara

Citing the Shlokas recited during the veneration of the lords.... Referring to the Trinity Gods - Bramha the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer 

This Shloka is emphasizing that Guru - The Supreme Teacher is above all Gods also above the holy trinity.....

Guru Bramha Guru Vishno  Meaning The Guru is equivalent to Bramha....

Guru is also equivalent to Vishnu....and Guru is also equivalent to Lord Shiva....

Guru Sakshaat ParaBrammha - Guru is the Incarnation (The Avataar) of Parabramha... the Eternal Truth.... the Omniscient (The All Knowledgeable) the Omnipotent (Eternally able and Powerful) and the Omnipresent (Kan Kan mein Stith... present everywhere)

Tasmai Sri Gurave Namah : Hey Guru, I bow to you from my heart and soul.

This is the amount of importance given to the Teacher the Guru and in our lives many people big and small, many people either elder or younger to us have definitely taught us something  or the other no matter how little....eventually turning them into our Gurus.

Today I take this opportunity to praise all of my Gurus and thank them for teaching me all that I have learned from them!

Happy Guru Purnima!!!

The path to Knowledge could be out of Digression!

 Many of you must have heard of AI or Artificial intelligence and the term ML or Machine Learning which is related to the development of Artificial Intelligence and few other terms like NLP, NER, Deep Learning, Data Science, BIG DATA, Et al

In my quest to touch base on these pointers and with an intent to revisit my knowledge and catch upon this trend which had disrupted the tech industry since a decade now (as of July 2021)... I decided to test my awareness and sought to google... verifying it's related terms.

I started from double checking the popular term "NLP" which with a faint recall had thought it to be Natural Language Programming only to know that its not what I was thinking and its full form actually reads - Natural Language Processing.... and this rectification and correction triggered in to revisiting the entire spectrum of terminologies related to AI - Artificial Intelligence.

There was one article explaining the difficulties and challenges of Natural Language Programming which had a term POS Tagging which said that
Part-of-speech tagging is harder than just having a list of words and their parts of speech, because some words can represent more than one part of speech at different times, and because some parts of speech are complex or unspoken. This is not rare—in natural languages (as opposed to many artificial languages)

As I started reading more about NLP I rapidly moved forward to many articles from NLP to NER to an article explaining NER (Named Entity Recognition) to multiple terms explaining NER to POS Tagging - to - POS Tagging Wiki - to - Artificial languages - to - Constructed Language Wiki - To the image Next to this Wiki - To -Tower of Babel Wiki - To a plethora of new words and/or Terminologies (New - being a relative term is obviously referring to me and my limited ken)

As I started reading this article - Tower of Babel (and this is where the digression started) I was struck with awe realizing as to how much deep and vast all this really is and how little do we actually know about the world, about mankind, its history and all its concepts in general... given that I had been reading Wikipedia right from its inception during the year 2005 - 2006

Mentioning few terms know and unknown from the article - Tower of Babel:

Hebrew - Religion of Jesus Christ as a child before his enlightenment
Genesis - The Book of Genesis is the first book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament.
Origin Myth - An origin myth is a myth that purports to describe the origin of some feature of the natural or social world.
Great Flood - Genesis flood narrative - The flood of Noah and companions
Shinar - is the southern region of Mesopotamia in the Hebrew Bible.
Ziggurat - pyramidal stepped temple tower that is an architectural and religious structure characteristic of the major cities of Mesopotamia (now mainly in Iraq)
Babylon - Babylon was the capital city of the ancient Babylonian empire.
Sumerian - Sumer is the earliest known civilization in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia (now southern Iraq)
Marduk - was a God from ancient Mesopotamia and patron deity of the city of Babylon.

And If I would continue further this article could go endless.... which is when I realized that I had gone through more then Ten to Fifteen odd tabs of Wiki articles to cite the shortest explanations of most of the newly learned terms...

Started with Artificial Intelligence and landed up in Mesopotamia!

Sometimes digressing from the primary topic could also land us up into a whole new world of unchartered knowledge.

My First Language - English

English is my first language at least that's what I am trying to tell myself since my college days. Even though I had been from an English medium school, my spoken English was pretty weak...and what I aspired to accomplish was really King English.

After schooling when we entered college I and my close friend realized that the kind of English our other classmates were speaking... we could not match their class, their level of communication was totally different...enhanced and polished and we on the contrary were struggling at basic day to day communication without using few supporting words from the local language. Forget about a decent vocabulary they used certain phrases which were totally new to us.... even though their conversation didn't have any difficult English words still we couldn't make sense out of it because we were not aware of those phrases.

We both realized that we in our schooling days had not paid enough attention on enhancing our language skills since we used to compare ourselves with vernacular medium students and feel great about ourselves that we can converse in English only to realize now that we were sailing in the same boat and we were struggling to understand as much as the vernacular medium students while learning from the professors and while socializing with other classmates who had come from different convent schools.

We decided that we take this setback seriously and do something to overcome it. We both did some research and came to the conclusion that we have to start with speaking to each other only and only in English, no matter what.

Thus I embarked on a journey to improve my language and went to the next level of starting to think in English. I had read it in an article - if you have to improve any language you need to start thinking in that language.... this definitely worked for me even though it took me a few years to achieve this feat.... I realized that I had come closer to achieve it once I recollected that I had woke up from a dream and I could remember bits and pieces of my dream and the narration of the recall of those parts in my mind was in pure English Language!

In the quest of improving my language I also figured out that Language improves Knowledge and Knowledge in turn helps you to build your language.... eventually Knowledge and Language become the Twin Towers of your Growth!

Both Language and Knowledge are dependent on each other and to enhance one you need to enhance the other as well in parallel

Further I learnt that to enhance any language that you are learning... you need to touch all the parts that comprise a language; namely:

1. Read 2. Write 3. Listen and 4. Speak

Of this above four aspects I was Reading quite a few books, I was Listening to English News channels and watching English Movies, Speaking to my friend in English and also trying to articulate on my own on topics that seemed difficult to me, however I figured a bit late that the Fourth aspect was largely Ignored.... Writing!

It had already been a decade and more and my journey of improving my language had come a long way. I had started way back in the year 1994, during the first year of college FYJC Science and I had worked hard on improving my vocabulary and there were few (not too many) words while reading random articles or news papers that were new to me or I couldn't guess the meaning of especially after reading the context, however this aspect (Writing) of the Language was totally left untouched and it was already too late now... say almost 16 years!

I decided that I need to catch up on this one and that it is never too late to start anything no matter how late this realization had occurred to me and this is how Blogging happened to me!

Blogging is an effort to enhance this fourth aspect of language - Writing! You have to start somewhere and this thought kindled in my mind in the year 2010 when I used to work on the same floor as the creative team of 'Indigo Consulting'... a full service Digital Marketing Agency I used to work for during those days.

I had observed the creative team brainstorming over ideas for ad banners and marketing campaigns and I used to feel like suggesting them a word or too but shied out.

Their co-existence inspired me to try my hand on blogging and this is when I wrote my first few blog posts.

Writing an article or a blog post is definitely the most difficult aspect of the language as compared to speaking which is the second most difficult one. Even though it may seem as if writing is more easier than speaking its only when one really starts writing a small article when one realizes what all goes in to it and once you start developing this aspect of your language you start enjoying it's completeness.

I will continue writing more articles and blog post to harness this skill and if you are reading this paragraph right from the start of the article then I thank you for your patience to go through me entire article and I will love to have your feedback or comments to help me reinforce my skill and continue with my passion.... Thank you!

MP3 MUSIC

I used to collect a lot of MUSIC back in the good old days of MP3 Invention. Those days... having a collection of MP3s in GBs was a thing to boast about....
I personally had a 13GB MUSIC collection out of a 40 GB capacity; Seagate Baracuda HDD (Hard Disk Drive)

Owning a 40GB drive itself was one of the priciest possessions considering back in those days... to be precise.... June 2002 when others mostly had a 20GB HDD max and then even to get to hear about a 40GB drive was quiet a headturner.

Having a collection of 13GB MP3 tracks would feel like... on top of the world.... supreme in a sense...
I would go to the extent of collecting all sorts of MUSIC from all different sources.... any and all genres...

I had Bollywood, Hollywood, Pop, Rock, Metal, Psychedelic, Trance, House, Reggae, Instrumental, Party Tracks, Hip-Hop, Jazz, RNB, Lounge.... and even Indian Classical MUSIC for that matter.... I remember having a rare collection of Pundit Bhimsen Joshi's tracks...

Those days I could bet on any random person to ask for some musical track to play on my desktop computer and I would play it for him/her in seconds... thanks to Winamp! the MUSIC software which was a boon during those good old days.

Would love to share an anecdote on the same lines.

One day a random guy in his late 40s had visited my place who had come along with one of my close friends. I casually asked him "would you like to listen to some MUSIC..." he rejected at first however on my insisting again he asked whether I had some tracks of this marathi singer named - Suman Kalyanpur... I tried my luck and searched in winamp and to my greatest surprise I actually had a few tracks of that singer!

I further asked... particularly which track... to that he replied some title name and that day lady luck seemed to be pretty benevolent and she did showered her blessings on me... I got lucky for the second time... I played the said track for him and let me tell you! that satisfaction in his eyes... to get to hear the track of his choice... did put a smile on his face and it also gave me... immense pleasure!