UI / UX
User interfaces and “user experience” ideas.
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Background: Remember when privacy was a thing? No? Oh, ok then. But people used to have some concern about having their location and whereabouts monitored by companies and governments. I guess this information was used for evil-doing at least once in history? Whatever, who cares, let’s gather data and make an app! The issue: Have…
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Background: Many years ago, only the elite members of society were literate. In some places, it was even ILLEGAL for commoners / peasants / slaves to be literate, for example: 1500s Korea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Opposition 1800s America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-literacy_laws_in_the_United_States Proposal: Now that we are allegedly in a more enlightened era, there is no way to use the alphabet…
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Background: A “three-way light switch” (i.e. two switches that control the same light) is useful when there are multiple places that need to control a single light, such as at both the top and the bottom of a staircase. The issue: Unfortunately, three-way switches are often out of sync with the actual state of the…
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Background: In the past, you could tell what a computer was doing (to some extent) just by listening to it. Disk access would be accompanied by a classic floppy disk sound (or the “click” of a hard drive) The fan would spin up if the CPU was under high load. You could actually listen to network…
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Background: Every US state has a flag. But only a few states have an icon—something immediately recognizable (and ideally, easily drawn and memorable). For an example of icons, we can look at Japan’s provinces (or “prefectures”), nearly all of which are represented by a distinctive single-color icon (Figure 1). Proposal: The proposal is as follows:…
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Background: Slide presentations are now a main ingredient in almost all lectures and presentations (Figure 1). The issue: Computers have made slide presentations extremely easy to make (example in Figure 2), but haven’t helped with one issue: presentations often go on FAR TOO LONG. For example, none of these ideas for promoting short presentations…
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The issue: Imagine this situation: You are a high-ranking member of the royal family. One day, you drive your expensive sports car to your downtown office, park it in the garage, and head to the elevator. You get in, and press the “6” button, to take the elevator to your sixth-floor office. But as soon…
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Background: Supposedly, the proliferation of ubiquitous GPS has lead to humans being worse at navigating, the presence of calculators has rendered most people incapable of doing even basic mental math, and the existence of written language has made humans worse at remembering things more generally. Proposal: In order to combat this “things are too easy”…
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Background: Many web sites require a user to agree to a long and incomprehensible “terms of service” before they can use the site. Since these contracts are dozens (or hundreds) of pages, everyone just scrolls to the end and clicks “AGREE.” (See two examples in Figure 1). While you’d think that a company could slip…
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