Posted on Tue, Apr 28, 2009
Last night, I had the pleasure of downloading an extremely sweet plug-in for Microsoft Outlook called Xobni (yes, it really took me several hours to realize that this strange word is “inbox” backwards – check it if you don’t believe me).
Xobni essentially is an ultra-fast Outlook contacts indexer, content searcher, inbox organizer and social media hunter. I must say, I like it a lot.
This tool is extremely usable. It integrates itself nicely with Outlook and requires no learning or tutorials. You’ll be using it effectively within seconds.
Instead of using the search window provided by Outlook, the user types their search query in the Xobni column (or the user can simply highlight an email from the person in question). Within it’s slick interface, Xobni pulls data from their LinkedIn or Facebook profiles.
I find this especially nifty for adding business contacts to my LinkedIn network without actually having to leave my inbox and venture out on the web (I’m lazy, so the chances of me actually logging on to LinkedIn a are rare).
However, the feature I like best is searching for attachments. A lot of us use our inbox as an overflowing pool of information – our very own electronic storage system. However, searching for a particular attachment from a specific person can sometimes be time consuming.
This is not the case when using Xobni. I simply search for the person in questions and ka-pow - Xobni can pull up all received attachments from that individual in a flash. This way, I don’t have to search for Stewart, then click on the paperclip thingy and manually sort through emails to find the document I should have read days ago.
Xobni also does a good job of demonstrating networks between email contacts by figuring out relationships and interactions between myself and my contacts.
Oh yeah, the add-in also pulls out phone numbers from emails, so even if I haven’t added their number to their contact details, Xobni can figure it out.
The only downfall I have encountered so far is that I don’t know how to pronounce Xobni.
I’d recommend trying out this slick bit of kit. Download it now.
Posted on Thu, Apr 16, 2009
I recently conducted a great set of usability labs.
Why were they great? The client I was working with was extremely hands-on and reactive. They were developers and engineers but realized that they lived in a different world to their users – everyday regular consumers.
For two days, the developers sat behind a screen watching the groups and taking notes. Every few labs, we’d speak about our findings and how we could counter any usability issues – it really was an interactive process.
By keeping the labs flexible, we were able to maximize our findings. After three or four labs, we were able to determine (logically) that certain issues were a big deal and needed to be fixed.
From that point on, we could comfortably steer the focus of the labs to other areas of the website in order to uncover issues that might have been overlooked and overshadowed by a problem we were abundantly aware of.