UI / UX
User interfaces and “user experience” ideas.
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Background: Occasionally, a video meeting will be scheduled with a large number of participants. The Issue: Since the participants are usually only arranged based on who is actually present in a meeting, it can be hard to figure out exactly who has (and hasn’t) shown up, especially if the meeting has 10+ participants. For example,…
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The Issue: Some people would like to drink less, but they have a hard time sticking to a small number of drinks. If only there were some sort of overcomplicated technical solution to this problem! Proposal: This “shrinking wine glass” (Figure 1) could be a solution to excessive drinking. Such a glass consists of two…
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Background: Staircases are surprisingly perilous. Most people have, at some point, attempted to step up onto a “phantom” additional top step or been surprised to encounter the ground floor a step early (Figure 1). Some commercial buildings indicate the very top and bottom of a flight of stairs with a raised pattern. However, this is…
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The Issue: It can be difficult to get motivated to read a textbook or dry historical tome. It’s much easier to read an action-filled story that features murder and intrigue! Proposal: In order to motivate a person to read a boring textbook, we will create a new kind of “hybrid” book: instead of printing a…
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Background: Two obvious qualities that contribute to making an alphabet “good”: It’s quick to write. The letters can be distinguished unambiguously. (Information density might also be worth considering—we don’t want the letters to take up too much space—but we’ll be ignoring it here.) Sometimes, speed-of-writing and ease-of-reading is a tradeoff: consider the shorthand shown in…
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The Issue: Vacuuming a house can be an annoying chore. Robots exist (famously, the Roomba) that will vacuum a floor, but they have many limitations and can’t handle certain common locations, like carpeted stairs. Proposal: What is needed is a vacuum cleaner that can go anywhere that gets foot traffic. And what better way to…
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The Issue: It’s frequently the case that a person has an insufficient number of hands to perform a particular task. Specifically, a person carrying two objects (Figure 1) might temporarily need an extra hand to operate a door handle / press a button / etc. As shown above, solutions to this problem are inelegant at…
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The Issue: When eating, sometimes the most appealing thing to do is to immediately wolf down all the food in front of you. People then occasionally regret this overeating, and wish there were some way to more easily exercise self control despite the presence of delicious food. Proposal: We can solve this wolfing-down of food…
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The issue: Frequently, people buy exercise equipment but then don’t actually use it. Instead, barbells gather dust and exercise bikes are used as a supplementary clothing racks. Proposal: One effective way of encouraging a person to use their exercise equipment is to have the equipment physically block access to the owner’s bed (Figure 1). This…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 