UI/UX Designer from Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.
Hello, This is Mandar Apte I am listing domains for sale that I am currently under my ownership.
Leading three domain brands that I own are as follows:
Workflow Kit
Best suited for automation domain-based web/mobile/tablet applications.
Usability Kit
Best suited for HCI, User Experience, and User Interaction domain-based web/mobile/tablet applications.
(more…)Bajirao Peshwa
Best suited for Hindu or Sanatani Hindu Religious related domain of work or blog.
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Background:
I joined GEP (Global eProcure) company as a UI Designer in 2015.
The company was overstaffed or overcrowded as they planned to buy two more floors in the same building. But it used to be seen as a time profitability of the company.
In a few weeks, I realised the company app we designed and developed was unstable and lousy by performance vice. And we were losing customers every day. In the words of the company’s current clients, they can’t even interact as the development team used multiple external frameworks on every page rather than inline coding it by themselves. It seems an analytical page that the company app’s essential feature took more than fifteen minutes to load, which should be not more than five seconds or less.
There were multiple Usability issues, such as an add user form with hundreds of input fields, no autocomplete, no progress bar, and no step-by-step wizard-type interface so that the user can take a break or complete tasks later. With this, a minute inactivity threshold was added by developers, which caused users to be unable to use the app. This company hired its staff to feed data rather than fix the product, as its clients can’t use it.
So it was messy. On the outside, the company was on a hiring spree with a shiny face outside. But inside, all was screwed up. And things were going downstream towards hell.
During this period, suddenly, we as a designing team got to know from our current manager, Mr Muthu, that a new UXD Manager will lead us from the next minute, and HR has arranged for a meeting with the team in the next three minutes.
We learned the new Manager was Mr. Roy. Our old demoted Manager was shaken inside.
My interaction with my old manager was abusive. He used to spit curses at every member with statements like design should be wow, मजा नही आ राहा है, i.e., In a word, it should look like interfaces designed by Apple or Microsoft UXD Team. The new manager even outsourced design to Microsoft’s Consultant for around fifty lakhs. But the result was a failure, with the money going for no good.
The Real Story:
In this ugly environment. I was having lunch with my team one fine day. A man almost my age was sitting before me named Mr Kadam. He suddenly started abusing my Brahmin Cast with statements I will list below in numbers.
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As far as I remember, we used to have Display, Illustration, Calligraphy/Typography, Photography and Print as specialisation subjects for the BFA Applied Art graduation course.
Even I preferred Illustrations over Photography. And my decision still stands true today.
Before choosing Photography for your life-long venture, let me explain a few points I want you to consider.
Is Photography Artform or Just Technique?:
What first thing you do in photography today is you have to buy a camera first. Now, all are digital cameras, so choosing a lens, filter, and measuring light can be fixed at a later stage. Post-production is dominating over pre-production and production planning. It is supposed to be Preproduction, i.e. Planning should be 80 or 90% of your time. Production should take, i.e. Actual execution should be 5% of the time. And post-production time should be 5% or nil as you have already planned everything. But it is precisely the opposite now.
Modern Mobile Phones:
Apple iPhone 15 Cameras with Massive Storage And production quality apps available at your fingertips. All apps are almost free.
Photo Sharing Web & Mobile Apps:
With Instagram, we hardly visit real-world exhibitions happening around the locality. Now, everyone posts their photos on Instagram and other social networks.
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Background:
Wikipedia Describes ChatGPT as an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 families of large language models (LLMs) and has been fine-tuned (an approach to transfer learning) using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.
ChatGPT can access real-time info from the web using plug-ins.
If you don’t want the ChatGPT User-agent to use your website’s data, you can block it using your robots.txt file.
A ‘robots.txt’ file is generally located at the root of the web server and can be accessed using SFTP or can be viewed using this URL:
https://yourwebsite.com/robots.txt
(replace ‘yourwebsite.com’ with your domain name)
You need to add this rule to your website’s ‘robot.txt’ file
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One fine day I was returning from one destination to home through a cab booked over Uber Cabs. While travelling, I snacked and drank water, and my hand was wet. Once I arrived, I made a trip payment through an online card or Amazon Pay.
About to get out of the car, I was scrolling on my iPhone through my wet fingers to rate that trip.
In the next second, I received an in-app notification that you had been charged INR 100 for tipping the driver for a safe ride. In disbelief, I thought about how that happened, as I was not planning to tip the driver.
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In 2009 I worked as an Animator and E-Learning Courseware Creator and Designer. And I was planning to switch the design domain to HCI/UX, i.e. Human-Computer Interaction/User Experience Design.
And software like Apple Shake and Adobe After Effects was standard competitive tool used in both domains.
I was using an iMac at that time. Adobe After Effects was bundled in Creative Suite, costing around INR 45,000/- in India. Apple Shake was way cheaper as it was a standalone offering from Apple.
It was the day of 30th July 2009 that I was going to start to learn the Apple Shake as Apple offered all tutorials on their website for free. And it was the same day that Apple discontinued Apple Shake. When I woke early to learn, I saw the news on their portal. I was devastated by the news. But I was relieved as I saved my time as if I started learning it two months ago, and then they discontinued it, which was a waste of time and energy. The software skill you acquired doesn’t exist in the world, or there is no demand for your talent in your industry, is a total waste of time.
By graduate degree, I am a BFA Applied Art graduate. I know the UX field has existed in India and World longer than I know, but I learned of it at my first job around 2007. I am a multidisciplinary designer.
I opted to do User Experience Design/User Interaction Design/Human-Computer Interaction Design certification around 2016. I have been going through HFI’s website since the year 2012.
HFI has three main certifications Certified Usability Analyst (CUA), Certified Certified
Certified User Experience Analyst (CXA), Certified Digital Persuasion Analyst (CDPA).
My observation was HFI was increasing the cost of Certification every year by 15% to 20%.
When I first visited their website, the cost was INR 75,000/-, But when I registered for the CUA course, it was INR 1,08,000/- Immediately the following year, they increased rice to almost INR 1,20,000/-.
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Apple’s iCloud is for iPhone, iPad and Mac cloud data syncing platforms activated by default for every Apple ID on any Apple device. Apple introduced Apple iCloud after the failure of MobileMe cloud offerings for Apple iPhone, iPad and Mac.
In day-to-day life, it may happen that you may accidentally delete or lose your Apple Address Book contacts or Safari Bookmarks or Calender data. But there is a way to restore in the case of loss. You can go to iCloud.com to restore your missing data from an earlier version.
Once you restore old data with current data, the existing data will get replaced. The restoration process can be undone in case of any glitches.
All business survives on net profit.
In accounting terms, here is how you calculate Net Profit. i.e. (Total Business Revenue) – (Total Business Expenditure) = Net Profit
In the business world, there are two types of industries Service and Product.
So if you are in the service industry, you survive on a paycheck by paycheck or hourly charges to the client. You have to work every hour of every day to make ends meet.
But if you are a product company, you create a product based on your market and user research. You find consumer problems/requirements/gaps in the market and then try to solve them by creating your product in that category. So building a product is based on solving problems that your users are having.
In my case, I was a designer by profession. I graduated with a BFA (Bachelor of Applied Arts) in Advertising. After my first two jobs, I tried freelancing in the web, UX, print, branding and animation film industries. I was the lone proprietor of my business. I was doing everything talking to clients, executing a project, delivering it and then waiting for the final payment to be released. It was too much for me at that time.
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In 2019, I bought myself an Apple iPhone 11 Pro 256GB and Apple Watch 5.
I have used an Apple iPhone 5s with 16GB since 2016. But I was dissatisfied with the storage that it allowed me to use. Out of 16GB, 10GB was the operating system, 2GB was for Apps that were able to fit it, 2GB was for Photos that I captured, then I had to delete to make space for the next ones, and 2GB was for other apps’ data.
It was total dissatisfaction with the Apple iPhone 5s.
In the year 2016, I had sciatica. So I used to walk for 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the evening or night. So I just walked 850 kilometres in a month to eliminate sciatica pain. I used to maintain my diary of walking approx kilometre completed in a day/week/month/year. But I was out of sync with my blood pressure, heart rate, calories burned etc.
When Apple iPhone 11 Pro and Apple Watch 5 got released impressed with features like ECG, Fitness app, and Health app capabilities. And I choose 256 GB storage for my iPhone as that’s what I require to sustain all photographs, music, videos and other data for a year or two without deleting it.
I used Apple Watch daily for three years to track my outdoor walking exercises, ECG, Heart Rate Monitoring, Calory burning, Exercise hours tracking, Standup Hours tracking, receiving notifications, receiving phone calls on my watch, reading SMS/Messages on my watch itself etc.
I was thrilled.
But one day, I broke my Apple Watch’s Crown or Wheel. I was devastated. I contacted Apple Service Centre. They said Apple Watch is unrepairable. And you are out of warranty too.
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