A number of recent developents in the IT world have encouraged me to finally write this post. In Mauritius, the cost of Internet access for customers has fallen quite a bit in recent years. Connection speeds have doubled a couple of times in the past years, which is very good.
Category: Mauritius
SBMNet Transfer Woes
A friend of mine just sent me this screenshot of SBMNet, State Bank of Mauritius (SBM)’s online banking facility. She wanted to transfer some money from her account to a friend’s at another bank. She was then presented with the form below:
SBM, that’s not how you design forms. Seriously, we don’t all have a degree in banking to know what your “Payee Id” is, what’s the difference between a Payee name and a Beneficiary Name and why you need four fields of Payment Details, intuitively called “Payment Details 1” to “Payment Details 4”. The sparse help messages are not helpful. At all.
Anyway, what’s Beneficiary Bank Address 2 and 3?! Come’on! It’s ridiculous! Fix your thing, before you can even claim to offer “online banking” on your adverts. It’s not useful.
Oh btw? The said friend? She’s decided to go in person to a bank branch to do the transfer. So much for your online services.
How it should be done? How about:
- Meaningful form names? Payment Details 1 is not helpful.
- Contextual help when you hover on the forms?
- Auto complete? Data-specific fields? Why should the user enter date? Can’t they choose from a dropdown?
- Information overload! Use a couple of screens, with steps and a “next” button?
- Or you know, just something like this
Hopefully someone will see this and fix this, or at least suggest a better design proposal. :p
EDIT: It’s 2016! They finally changed it!
Online Services Mauritius Does Not Have And Why
First post of 2012. So let’s start with something like a wish list. In this post, I’ll run down through a list of online services Mauritius should have and why it doesn’t have these relatively common services.
Let’s start.
Mauritius is not a cyber island yet. Here’s why.
For some reason, our political leaders are bent on using the word “cyber” whenever the get the opportunity to. Everything is cyber here: Cyber caravan, Cyber Crime or something along that line as well as a few other cyber things here and there. What does “cyber” mean anyway?
Merriam-webster says something about “the culture of computers”. It must be a joke: I hardly see any kind of “culture of computers” in Mauritius.
We are far, VERY FAR from deserving being called a cyber island yet. Why? Lots of reasons actually…
Day 2: Orange Expo 2011 Revisited!
I felt my Day 1 at Orange Expo felt kinda rushed. There were things I missed, things I didn’t notice. So when the family wanted to go there today, I thought it’d be a good opportunity to go again. Turns out, I did discover a few new things.
So this post will be less about the tech there, and more about the Expo itself, its organization, ideas and some suggestions to Orange, as I go through it.
For this post, I’ll not make the mistake of trying to compare the Orange Expo with the expos you have abroad. They cannot be compared. Instead, what we should be doing is comparing the Orange Expo 2011 with its peer: Infotech. On Day 1, I wanted to see iPad 2 and Xoom and all the new shiny toys out there. As a geek, I wanted to see them, play with them. But I realized that many people who visited the expo today didn’t even know what an iPad was! To them, it was something new and wonderful.
Orange Expo 2011: The Review
The Orange Expo 2011 is held this year from 8th April to 10th April at the Swami Vivekananda International Convention Center (SVICC). Anyway, if you’re reading this, you’ll only be having a day left to visit, and that’s 10th April, from 10h to 19h.
With that said, here’s my experience and thoughts on expo. Sorry for the blurry or low-light pics. My camera had big issues focusing on all the Orange there… I was kind of in-a-hurry too, so I may have missed a few things. If I did, please let me know via comments.
Emtel releases MIFI: Share Internet Access On The Go
Emtel has released their new product, which they call the Emtel MIFI – Mobile Wifi.
You purchase the Huawei E5 modem which is a Wireless Access Point (AP) and pocket router that accepts a SIM card such as a fixed IP SIM, and you get to share mobile Internet with up to 5 WIFI-compatible devices at the same time.
Here’s a quick post about its features, and what I think about the device and the service which will enable access to popular sites like 겜블시티. Here’s the full advert that also appeared in newspapers:
Is it me, or do the 1st 3 people have really long arms?