Zoho CRM User Experience & Interaction Design Blog

Wowww! I could not believe what I am hearing. Epic was once a company that does not pay much attention to quality sound tracks in their games. Unreal tournament, when launched featured decent sound tracks at that time. After that, Halo came into the scenario and pushed the benchmarks higher.

Right now, I am listening to the sound tracks from Unreal Tournament 3’s website.My my.. they are very impressive. Kudos to the music team at EPIC and Midway. U guys have done a good job.

- Rajesh Sundaram

I was reading news.com blog here. It is about the UI change proposed for FireFox 3. The FF’s UI team has decided to make FF look like a part of the OS. There are many other changes planned too. But what I request those guys are : FIX THE MEMORY LEAK. Sometimes my FF instance ends up eating nearly 500MB of RAM after running continually for a couple of days!

Rajesh Sundaram

Gold is considered as a good avenue for investment. Experts suggest that short-term investment is gold with careful planning will yield better returns.  So what would be the better medium? Jewels? or Gold bars? The answer is solid gold. No Jewelry. Then what would be the best investment period? Short term or Long term? The answer is Short term. If short term, then what would be the exact time duration? The answer is 2 years or 3 years.

Buying Gold for future investments
Assume that you buy 10grams of 22-carat gold (from HDFC/ICICI/UTI) once in every 2 months for Rs.11K (avg). Then at the end of one year, you will have 60grams of gold worth Rs.67K in hand. By the year end, the market value of that gold would be definitely 5-8% more. Assume the value is Rs.72K. Next, when you invest in gold for a total of 3 years, you will have Rs.220K worth of gold in hand, which is, obviously a good sum of money. So if you plan properly, you can en-cash the gold with your bank and pay a property loan’s or new car loan’s up-front payment.

Buying Gold for buying Jewelry
The idea is to buy Gold as ‘Gold Coins’ or ‘Gold Bars’ from reputed Jewelries.  Buy solid gold periodically for 2 or 3 years. By the end of the period, buy jewelry using the solid gold in the same Jewelry. The trick is to find a good / reputed jewelry chain. Big names like GRT, Tata Gold, Alukkas are offering good services in the market. So buying gold from them would be safe. But ensure, proper billing and quality check certificates.

- Rajesh Sundaram

Usability testing requires a lab. A company has to spend a good budget to setup a usability lab with computers, cameras, monitors, splitters etc etc. Some usability labs even have one-way mirror to monitor people. But what if? if you wanna do usability testing but cannot afford a lab or do not have time to invite test users to your place or visit your test user’s place? Well the answer is simple. Go for Remote usability testing. Techsmith’s Morae, and Webex are few excellent tools to do remote usability testing. In intranets, you can use VNC clients.

We use Webex to do some Remote Usability testing for Zoho CRM.This actually helps us to see the user’s interaction live and get his feedback/comments. There are few free/low-priced web conferencing services available out there, which will help you to do RUT without burning a hole in the purse.

Zoho CRM is not sleeping or it is not like there are no activities at Zoho CRM. We are enhancing the current edition and works are happening behind the screen. Apart from the current regular updates, these nifty enhancements will start appear beginning 2008.

So whats new happening at Zoho? apart from a television coverage going on.. there is this ZOHO  logo setup. Concept by Jawahar babu of Zoho Writer, and made by ‘Thotta Tharani’’s skillfull team, these colorful boxes arrived yesterday evening.

- Rajesh Sundaram