An experiment in light expression

This Monday I flew Jet Airways from Delhi to Bangalore and was pleasantly surprised by Jet Airways’ new in-flight entertainment system. The system has a good and contemporary music selection ranging from the unavoidable Himesh Reshammiya numbers to some good jazz. What stood out in the music experience was the jukebox function which allows users to quite easily select tracks and add them to a playlist. The jukebox does have its usability issues including 1) you cannot select songs from a particular album without actually selecting to ‘play’ that entire album 2) the playlist disappears from memory if the inflight entertainment system is shut off - which happened to the playlist i created before the flight took off 3) at some point you can get back to the main menu and have the song playing and have no way to turn off the song without actually selecting another one!

As such the system is quite visually savvy and the video selection isn’t all that bad but the availability of music in that 140 minutes flight made it a pleasant experience for me.
Apparantly the competition saw this coming and now Kingfisher has implemented Live TV in its flights - becoming one of the few airlines in the world to offer this service.

During my Barcamp conversations with Ashish from Yahoo and Soumya from Aditi, i was stuck by how User Experience (UX) and Product Management (PM) are two groups which have more in common than many other product development related groups.

Both care about products being successful, easy to use, and differentiated in a cluttered technology marketplace. Both use various methods to gather customer and user data and map that data into features, functions, and User Interfaces. Both need to be good at what they do but also good at generally understanding technology, competitors and market trends.

Boxes and Arrows even had an interesting plug on ‘Transitioning from User Experience to Product Management’ - both the authors are ex-UX professionals who now work as product managers. They’ve outlined some interesting distinctions and overlaps in these two roles.

I think Product Managers and UX professionals/managers can collaborate and find common ground on several areas: Field research methods (dont both groups use interviewing and focus groups as a standard data gathering technique?), wireframing and prototyping, development of product roadmaps (most UX groups are called too late to the table for roadmap discussions), joint customer site visits, and how usability and design labs can be jointly used by PM and UX professionals to conduct user sessions.
I’m thinking of organizing a round table along these lines - perhaps in d-camp space. Feel free to send me any ideas on this…

Barcamp Bangalore 3 wrapped up this Sunday, April 1 at the IIM Bangalore campus. I was only able to make it for the afternoon sessions but had some good hallway conversations with Param, Abhinav, Rajan (a sharp entrepreneur and co-founder of Motvik), Ashwin (speed demon who loves cruising the ideascape – and live blogging), Arun - a Barcamp and tech veteran, Harish (who has some great ideas on applications for unstructured and structured data – and is looking for smart tech folks for his startup -OneBigWeb, Rajiv (who started Mobile Monday in Bangalore and runs his WLAN startup Sedna), Hazra (independent visual artist and old comrade from my consulting days), MJ (A landmark graduate who told me much about utility computing at his company), and Soumya and Ashish (both from IIM B and currently Product Managers – at Aditi and Yahoo respectively – with great ideas on Web 2.0, Indian startups, and the blogging)…

My only gripe about Barcamp - it could be a bit wierder, with more edge conversations, and with a broader mix of design, music, art and technology - not just technology itself. This Barcamp’s theme - social tech - while treading new ground for Bangalore Barcamp is an old theme in general - and the absense of true artists, visionaries, or voices from the grounds of culture and the social sciences was felt. Barcamp does not need to be Burning Man, but it could get a bit edgier, more informal, a bit more chaotic as far as the themes, speakers, and presentations go - so that some magic may emerge.

Nonetheless, Barcamp still remains one of my favorite places to meet folks slightly outside of the mainstream in this part of the world..