Author Archives: Kshipra

About Kshipra

user experience designer, curious by nature, early adopter, gadget nut, remix cook, dog aficionado, ceramic cup collector http://about.me/kshipra

Have you checked in yet?

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So you are way ahead in the numbers of check-in to locations you pass by (you needn’t really enter) & fighting for mayor-ships with your new found foursquare friends? then you have been webbed in the Location Based Services craze.

Yup i have used both Gowalla & Foursquare along with Hootesuite, Waze, Instagram, Picplz, etc which allow foursquare integration so that me doesn’t miss out on the points & badges to gain!

Many times though Gowalla is more forgiving that Foursquare & allows me to check in with a larger radius (5 km).  The cell towers/wi-fi zones don’t provide accurate information & using the GPS just drains off most of my battery.

Right now i don’t see much value add other than catching up with my friend’s location…which can get annoying if you receive too many pings from them :-P & of course, the food updates & what they upto @ that location which really makes me wonder why i added them in the first place!

It was quite amusing when one “friend” did steal the mayor-ship of the area i lived in & quite happily tweeted about it (it is an automatic setting though). I did get it back when i logged in from the web & realized that the pin of the accurate location was moved!

Anyone can add a location in the middle of nowhere & anyone can edit it from moving the location & another user can just delete it. Though foursquare has changed certain rules now & editing powers is given to users who created a location.

There are also several 3rd party applications of foursquare which allow auto check-in so you don’t forget to check-in to your usual haunts. The most amusing one is the one which protects your mayor-ships :-)

Assumptions: The friends new to the city might find useful data your provide about a place helpful along with the map so they don’t have to hound your personal partying life to take them out :-)

Too much security is a pain for the user experience

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Had to help Dad reactivate his online trading account with PIPIP bank….boy oh boy…first we had received an activation process by snail mail. The instructions were not clear on how to reactivate, there was only activation info. Used the password in that reactivation process and logged in…it worked…grrrrr…
Then had to fill in rest of the info provided in the activation sheet…again there was no mention whether it was activation or reactivation.
On submission there was a link to login again without logging me out..how did that happen?
After I logged in….again there was no info whether my reactivation was successful or not!
Seriously who build such interfaces which is not humanized and keep you anxious throughout the process.
And don’t even get me started on the multi Browser compatibility…Come on this is 2010 :-(
Talk about virtual keyboard..yeah they are secure but Imagine i strained my eyes to get a look at the keys….imagine my Dad would have to Zoom-in and click on them :-(
Phew….I just logged in after an hour later to check and found the profile active.
Even after all this frustration if they hadn’t activated the account…I would have just closed that account for Dad :-P