Quick Thoughts on Mobile UX

Mobile UIs haven't changed a lot in the dozen odd years that I've been using cellphones. My first phone, a Nokia 3310, had an icon-based menu that I struggled to navigate using physical keys. My current Android smartphone still has an icon-based menu, albeit one I can navigate more easily using a touch screen. Although I can now access most applications straight from my multiple home screens and the quick launch bar of my Android phone, the navigation paradigm essentially remains the same. With the possible exception of Windows 8, most mobile operating systems have failed to take full advantage of the touch screen to make the mobile user experience easier and more intuitive. This is where Panasonic's Gesture Play navigation promises to bring about a sea change. Though the company is yet to release more details about this new feature in their upcoming P31 phone, the ads that have been shown on TV do look promising.

JIRA (not Jeera)

Of late, every company that I speak to during my job search asks me if I have worked on JIRA. Since the only Jeera I have known is the humble cumin seed, used in many delicious Indian dishes like Jeera Rice, I decided to read up on this particular web-based software, which is used for issue tracking, software development and project management. Developed by an Australian company called Atlassian, JIRA has been around since 2002 and was originally made for issue management. JIRA’s flexible plugin architecture has spawned many integrations developed by the JIRA development community and third parties. It is available in desktop, hosted (Cloud) and mobile versions.

After taking a demo on the Atlassian website, I can tell you that JIRA remains at heart an issue tracking tool. But by defining "issue" in various ways like Defect, Requirement or User Story, you can use JIRA for bug tracking, general project management or Agile project management respectively. JIRA can be used for creating tasks, assigning tasks, tracking the task status, recording time spent on each task and generating status reports.

JIRA Agile (formerly GreenHopper) is an add-on for Scrum or Kanban teams. The easy user interface helps your team easily adopt Agile project management. Bonfire is another add-on that helps QA teams test Web applications. They can take screenshots with the Bonfire browser extension and tag them to Test Sessions, which are the central place in a JIRA project to track manual testing of a Defect, Requirement or User Story.

Atlassian offers various software development tools that are integrated into JIRA. Their team collaboration software, called Confluence, is designed to be used in conjunction with JIRA. JIRA even has a Service Desk module to streamline customer requests. Finally, Atlassian has a marketplace with more than a thousand add-ons available to extend JIRA and use it for more activities related to your daily project management needs.