Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Emotional Intelligence Training @ Mumbai

There was a session on Emotional Intelligence on 1st March, conducted at our office base branch. I was fortunate to have an opportunity to attend this training along with 25 other associates from different locations. We had an external faculty having 15+ years of experience in the field of Organizational Behavior , Learning and Personal Development.

It was a full day session, where our lecturer focused on explaining the various parts of human brain, thinking pattern, emotions and they way they effect our daily to day life. Also, he took some tests to help us gauge our EI score.

It was very interesting to know that basic fundamentals of what comprises the Emotional Quotient and why, it is so important in today's life. In theoretical concepts, Emotional Intelligence refers to the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships. It is an important consideration in human resources planning, job profiling, recruitment interviewing and selection, management development, customer relations and customer service, and more.

Emotional Intelligence links strongly with concepts of 'Spirituality': bringing compassion and humanity to work, and also to 'Multiple Intelligence' theory which illustrates and measures the range of capabilities people possess, and the fact that everybody has a value.


The EQ concept argues that IQ, or conventional intelligence, is too narrow; that there are wider areas of Emotional Intelligence that dictate and enable how successful we are.

EQ embraces two aspects of intelligence:
1. Understanding yourself, your goals, intentions, responses, behavior and all.
2. Understanding others, and their feelings.

There are 5 domains to measure this. Daniel Goleman identified them as
1. Knowing your emotions.
2. Managing your own emotions.
3. Motivating yourself.
4. Recognizing and understanding other people's emotions.
5. Managing relationships, i.e., managing the emotions of others.

The degree to which we understand and manage ourselves effectively and to have better awareness of others, their feelings and meanings of their interaction with us is a measure of our own EI. The diagram illustrates this relationship.



At the end of the session , I felt that despite possessing a high IQ rating, success does not automatically follow. It is our ability of how well we are able to know our-self and make an empathetic connection with others, that decides our success ratio. Moreover, our brain's have the power of manifesting everything that we truly desire with persistent commitment and passion.

Monday, January 3, 2011

My first practical assignment on User Experience :-)

I am very excited to share updates about my first project assignment on UX, that I have been working for last 1.5 month. It is a platform for me to apply my usability concepts and knowledge that I have gained so far from online UX tutorials, blogs, Technical forums etc.

I am working on a Ruby and Rails tutorial with my friends in India (Abhishek Nalwaya and Akshat Paul). Our objective is to improve the overall experience of this site. The initial versions of this tutorial were deployed in Heroku with the sole intention of learning some new technologies. But now, we want to completely focus on re-designing this site for improving the usage. It is a small effort from our side to contribute to the ROR community.

So we started with analyzing the site usage results in Google Analytics Dashboard, where we observed a very high bounce rate. Moreover, the Google pagerank and visual appeal of the tutorial was not very good, which definitely implied that there is a huge scope of improvement.



We came up with these initial thoughts to start our work :-

Improve the whole information architecture by revising the content with the latest version material, as that is the main deciding factor to retain visitors on any tutorial. Also, adding two sitemap's i.e. one for site visitors and the other for googlebot would be helpful to provide an organized view of the site to its visitors.
Navigation mechanism can be structured better by shifting the navigation links to the top , so that we have more space on the content page. The social media icons and twitter feeds are not prominent currently and they can made more visible.

We pushed our first release on 18 Dec with following improvement stories:-

1. XML sitemap implemented and registered in Google Webmaster Tools to improve the content accessibility to the crawler.



2. Favicon added to have a unique brand image to the tutorial.



3. Revision of the About Us page with pictures to make the developers more approachable for suggestions and feedback's.



We are currently working on the content revision and application of search optimization techniques. I would keep you guys updated about my learning experience with this system. In case you have any suggestions or feedback, please feel free to reach out to me.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Pyramid of Success

"Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable."


Thursday, December 2, 2010

Monday, November 22, 2010

The hierarchy of website user needs




1. Accessibility: The website can be found and used by all people.
2. Stability: The website is consistent and trustworthy.
3. Usability: The website is user-friendly.
4. Reliability: The website is consistently available, without downtime.
5. Functionality: The website offers content, tools and services users value.
6. Flexibility: The website adapts to needs and wants of users.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

How is UX profession different from a BA role, though both work to bridge the gap between IT and Buisness ?

What does it mean to be designing "User Experience" and looking through the lens of the user ?
Do BA's think differently from UX engineers ?
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Like this, I had several questions in my mind related to UX and BA profession and the technique they use to tackle real time business problems.

Came across this interesting interview article between Laura Brandenburg ( Independent BA consultant ) and Patrick Quattlebaum (Chief Experience Officer at Macquarium ) and yes, It did answer many of my questions.

http://www.bridging-the-gap.com/what-a-ba-should-know-about-the-ux-profession-interview-with-patrick-quattlebaum/