Vinita Shrivastava, Senior Director at Harman India, on how to ensure loyalty while helping employees reach personal goals

Missed BusinessLine's Twitter Chat on performance reviews? Read the Storify here!

TT Srinath reviews Sankarasubramanyan Ramamoorthy's book

No matter where you are in your career, it is always important to evaluate your current role, how you envision success, your steps to achieve it, and ultimately, get to where you want to be

The Maharashtra government must create a favourable legal environment that protects the rights of and ensures the safety of seasonal migrant workers in the sugar industry

Farmers of Navalgund block were facing challenges in finding direct market and bringing down input cost. There was a need to establish an FPO (Farmers Producers Organisation), which materialised in 2016

Government hopes the measure will ensure adequate domestic availability of rice, wheat and atta; it plans to bring down reserve price of rice by ₹200 a quintal, which will now be ₹2,900 a quintal

Standing Committee also questions the high GST rate on components of fertilizers

Traders claimed the central government's decision to impose 40% duty on the export of onions till December 31, 2023 will adversely affect the onion growers and its export

The multi-state cooperative has so far earned Rs. 22 crore profit from April during the current financial year

The Board is expected to help develop and grow the spice’s market in India, which controls over 62% share of the turmeric world trade

Govt prepared to extend necessary support to the company in expanding its oil palm and dairy businesses 

They have to declare stock position of paddy and rice every Friday

PM Modi made his comments while inaugurating the pilot project of “world’s largest grain storage plan”, which is being done across 11 States

BKS terms the government’s attitude towards farmers’ demands “regrettable”; seeks MSPs, abolition of GST on agri inputs, and increase in Kisan Samman Nidhi income support payments for farmers

The decision assumes importance as it comes before the crucial Lok Sabha polls in key onion belts like Nashik, Ahmednagar and Solapur in Maharashtra

Limited availability of chickpeas in the world market could force India to import of yellow peas, which are available in abundance, say officials

The government initiated the sale of onions at a subsidised rate through mobile vans and outlets of NCCF and NAFED.

The Centre added that shipments by rail rake to Lucknow and Varanasi will be scheduled in next few days

Britain’s largest festival about refugees and sanctuary is more relevant than ever, writes Lydia Noon.

The world will miss the lawyer and philantrophist who defended Mandela and was chair of Oxfam, writes Mari Marcel Thekaekara.

Rûwâhîne by Ifriqiyya Electrique; The Underside of Power by Algiers: our music reviews of the month.

A source of corruption and environmental degradation. Rod Harbinson reports.

A gesture of love and solidarity from estates and communities in East London to Grenfell and their local community.

We talked to homeless in different countries and they revealed housing insecurity's different causes around the world.

Over the years, I've given more than 300 presentations on design. Most of these have been accompanied by a slide deck to illustrate my points and guide the narrative. But making the content in these decks work well with the Ask Luke conversational interface on this site has been challenging. So now I'm trying a new approach with AI vision models.

To avoid application specific formats (Keynote, PowerPoint), I've long been making my presentation slides available for download as PDF documents. These files usually consist of 100+ pages and often don't include a lot of text, leaning instead on visuals and charts to communicate information. To illustrate, here's of few of these slides from my Mind the Gap talk.

In an earlier article on how we built the Ask Luke conversational interface, I outlined the issues with extracting useful information from these documents. I wanted the content in these PDFs to be available when answering people's design questions in addition to the blog articles, videos and audio interviews that we were already using.

But even when we got text extraction from PDFs working well, running the process on any given PDF document would create many content embeddings of poor quality (like the one below). These content chunks would then end up influencing the answers we generated in less than helpful ways.

To prevent these from clogging up our limited context (how much content we can work with to create an answer) with useless results, we set up processes to remove low quality content chunks. While that improved things, the content in these presentations was no longer accessible to people asking questions on Ask Luke.

So we tried a different approach. Instead of extracting text from each page of a PDF presentation, we ran it through an AI vision model to create a detailed description of the content on the page. In the example below, the previous text extraction method (on the left) gets the content from the slide. The new vision model approach (on the right) though, does a much better job creating useful content for answering questions.

Here's another example illustrating the difference between the PDF text extraction method used before and the vision AI model currently in use. This time instead of a chart, we're generating a useful description of a diagram.

This change is now rolled out across all the PDFs the Ask Luke conversational interface can reference to answer design questions. Gone are useless content chunks and there's a lot more useful content immediately available.

Thanks to Yangguang Li for the dev help on this change.

As the functionality and scope of Web sites and applications has grown over the years, so has the prevalence of Help pages. Nearly every feature has an explanatory article outlining how to use it and why. But most Help pages are walls of text making them hard to act on. So a few years ago, we tried something different.

First let's look at the status quo. This Help page from Amazon is both pretty typical and by those standards, pretty good. It's specific to one topic, brief, outlines steps clearly, and includes links to help people accomplish their intended task. Companies iterated to these kinds of Help pages because they mostly work and because they're less work.

Keeping Help text up to date and accurate is less labor-intensive than updating images or videos with the same information. But as the old saying goes, a picture is worth a lot of words and there's a reason many people turn to video tutorials to learn how to do things instead of reading about how to do them.

When building Polar several years ago, we wanted a more approachable and fun way of helping people learn how to use our product. And while you might say "the best Help pages are no Help pages -just make your app easy to use" not all Help pages are smearing over usability issues. Some introduce higher level concepts, others outline capabilities, and some serve as marketing for specific features.

So with those goals in mind, we iterated to a simple formula. Each concept or feature gets a Help page that has a title alongside 1-2 sentences and as many sections consisting of a title, 1-2 sentences, plus a graphic as needed.

This approach meant people primarily relied on images (or their alt tags if visually impaired) to figure out how to get things done. So we iterated a fair amount on the images to find the right balance of detail and abstraction. Make the UI too realistic and it becomes hard to focus on the relevant elements. Realistic UI images also need updating anytime the actual product UI changes. Conversely, make the image too simplistic and it doesn't provide enough detail for people to actually learn how to do things.

Of course, not all Help topics are well suited to an image but the process of trying to create one often triggers ideas on how to simplify the actual UI or concepts within a product. So it's worth the iteration.

But is a visual approach to Help pages able to scale? Assuming it works, can companies invest the time and effort needed to generate all these images and keep them up to date? Perhaps in a time of image generation AI models, it's increasingly possible through automated or supervised pipelines. Time will tell!

Breakthrough could lead to new type of energy source

New material is made by compressing treated wood

A fashion stylist is curating a nomadic shop highlighting hand-picked vintage pieces, and art

A former king’s retreat becomes a writer’s new muse

Baselworld, one of the most important watch fairs in the world that hosts brands like Rolex, Omega and Breitling was held in Basel this month from March 22-27. Here’s a Luxe review of some of the novelties to watch out for

A visit to the 160-year-old Minerva watch factory in Switzerland is a revelation for the watch enthusiast about the many complex components that ultimately makes for a fine timepiece

Notes from Baselworld 2018, keeping an eye out for top innovations in watchmaking

Every year just before Easter, Basel hosts the world’s biggest and most important watch show where some of the most prominent watchmakers arrive to boast of their latest creations. As this year’s Baselworld went off successfully, we bring you the top five men’s timepieces from the Messe Basel exhibition centre

A walk through the University of Leuven in Belgium throws up insights, brews and delicious food

The 2018 Baselworld focusses anew on women’s watches. Watch manufacturers are now no longer emphasising on just bejewelled timepieces but also offering complications. Here is our pick of the top four timepieces that stand out from the rest

Visiting chef Agostino D’ Angelo takes his audience through the flavours of true Sicilian food

If you love great design and architecture, Finland’s capital is right up your alley

A travel list for anyone who loves petals and blooms

Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2023]

Edmonton, Alberta : Brush Education Inc., [2023]

London ; Philadelphia : Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2024.

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge , 2024.

Singapore : Springer, [2024]

Bloomington, IN : Solution Tree Press, [2023]

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge , 2025.

Cincinnati : University of Cincinnati Press, 2021.