UI / UX
User interfaces and “user experience” ideas.
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Background: A trend started in the 2020s where car owners would affix stickers to their car reading “Student Driver: Please Be Patient!” (Examples: https://www.google.com/search?q=student+driver+stickers+fad). For some reason, the wording of these stickers is almost always identical: “Please Be Patient” or “Thanks for Your Patience.” Proposal: The goal of these stickers seems to be to increase the…
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The Issue: In grocery stores, many snacks are sold in gigantic jumbo size packages. It can be hard to resist the compelling economic argument in favor of these snacks: you might get TEN TIMES as many potato chips for only twice the price. Unfortunately, this means that you may later feel compelled to actually eat…
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Background: One great idea for encouraging people to get exercise is the 2012 phone app “Zombies, Run!” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombies,_Run). This program gauges the user’s jogging progress by monitoring their phone’s GPS location, and it periodically warns the user that a horde of virtual zombies is chasing them. This should motivate the jogger to temporarily speed up…
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Background: When learning a foreign language, it can be difficult to advance beyond the stage of extremely basic competency. Once a person can “kind of” use a language, it is rare that their communication attempts will be corrected by random strangers, so that person will end up saying things like “Here, there is pancakes served?…
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Background: Many people find the relentless piling up of emails in their inbox to be stressful. There are various approaches for dealing with this. The most well-known is probably “inbox zero,” which recommends triaging emails when they’re relatively new (instead of procrastinating and letting them pile up). Although “inbox zero” doesn’t require that you should…
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The Issue: When a person is walking around a corner, there’s always a chance that they’ll unluckily collide with someone walking the opposite way (Figure 1). The fundamental problem is obvious enough: there’s just no way to see around the corner. Hospitals and parking garages frequently solve this issue by placing a big convex mirror…
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The Issue: Washing machines and clothes dryers save an immense amount of time. But there’s still a significant bottleneck in the pipeline from “dryer” → “pile of clothes” → “dresser / closet”: specifically, the process of actually identifying each article of clothing (Figure 1). Before the pile of clothes can be sorted and put away, the clothes-washing individual will…
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Background: Many common household pets have the properties of being soft, furry, and generally snuggleable. These also sound like the properties of a well-designed fuzzy throw pillow, but the pillow lacks at least two sensory properties that a real animal (such as a dog, in this example) can provide: the propensity to lick things, and…
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Background: A simple observation: as creatures have become more complex and develop advanced societies, they tend to use fewer limbs for locomotion and more limbs for manipulating the world. Compare these ”civilizational” achievements: From this data, we conclude that the key element in the progress of civilization is the number of arms. More arms =…
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The Issue: Income sources and expenses often operate on mismatched schedules. For example, a person might receive a paycheck every two weeks, but need to pay rent monthly and car insurance every six months. These differing schedules can make it difficult for a person to visualize their cashflow. There are lots of ways to visualize…
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