Archive for October, 2009

Ajnad, far superior and more accurate than Yamli…errrmmm

In a comment about yamli.com I was told that Ajnad.com is far superior and more accurate than Yamli.com

I thought it would be cool to compare both side to side, here’s what I got (click to enlarge)

Ajnad

I hate to say this, but this is a MAJOR fail. In the transliteration domain, Yamli is still king!… Continue reading

souq.com revisited

Souq.com has a new interface, it’s more like a bit of tweaking but still a lot is missing and the whole essence (experience) is still lacking. I know I know, “…but it’s working”.

Personally, I believe that it should go through a simple cycle, “functional, fast, pretty” It is functional (technically speaking); fast (again, technically speaking) but not pretty (usability/ux wise)

The dominant tool on souq.com is the… Continue reading

A mistake

Dear Tweepi,

When you notify the user that he’s not “logged in” you have to provide him/her/it/so-so with a link or a way to actually sign in to use your services.

You are still in “beta”, you have a nice service going on there, so I’ll cut you some slack.

Arabic search engines…a review…Part Trois

In my final post (till I can be bothered again) about search engines, Yamli is our star of this post.

I don’t really consider Yamli as being a search engine (calm down) it is a transliteration service, making it easy for users who do not type in Arabic or have an Arabic enabled keyboard to search using GOOGLE.

It is what Google (and ALL Arabic search engines) missed!… Continue reading

Quickie

A quick review of souq.com done a month ago, nothing serious just skimming through the website.

Download the PDF

Arabic search engines…a review…Part Deux!

After a quick review of Ayna and Araby’s layout, off to the goody stuff, the actual search experience.

I am really bad in typing Arabic, like really bad. Fortunately both search engines, Araby and Ayna, provide a nice feature, the virtual keyboard. How thoughtful for us who suck at typing in Arabic. Really thoughtful and extremely nice feature, till you use it!

I mean come on guys! using… Continue reading

Arabic search engines…a review…Part Un

we have to admit, local search engines around the middle east are not (for the time being) a threat to Google and if you look closely since they started popping up till now, it looks like they’ll never be.

I am gonna slice n’ dice (kind of) Ayna and Araby

Landing page:

Ayna

Ayna landing

Multi-uses pen

One important tool I can NEVER live without in the process of UX designing is the pen. It does come to “if you had to choose one tool for UX to work with for the rest of your life” the answer would be a pen.

Things got  a bit better for me (and anyone who uses bookmarks for his books, who wants to tag a certain paragraph…)… Continue reading

Creating wireframes

Nick Fink creating a draft wireframe of a project he’s working on. He uses Omigraffle (after playing around with Visio et al Omnigraffle puts the rest to shame!) VERY beautiful to watch (the geek in me)… Continue reading