UI / UX
User interfaces and “user experience” ideas.
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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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Background: Essentially all major programming languages exclusively use keywords written in English. (For a couple of exceptions, see the addendum at the end.) But this doesn’t have to be the case! Proposal: By using symbols instead of words, we can convey a concept both more concisely and more easily across languages. See below for a…
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Background: The humble door-locking deadbolt has suffered from a severe failure of innovation and imagination in the last 100 years. Specifically: most deadbolts have exactly two positions (Figure 1): Open (door can be opened from either side) Closed (door requires a key to open from the outside or a switch to be operated from the…
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Background: The stop sign, for all its utilitarian simplicity, has a severe and critical shortcoming: it has two different roles, both marked by the same sign (Figure 1). The two situations, and what the driver must do in each case: All-way stop: driver can casually check for other cars right there at the intersection, and…
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The issue: If you’re wearing headphones, it can be difficult to hear when someone is trying to get your attention. (Similarly, it can be heard to get the attention of someone wearing headphones without startling them.) Proposal: Headphones could have a small microphone on them with a processing unit that could listen for certain words.…
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The issue: In many houses, certain rooms—especially kitchens and living rooms—have a half dozen or more light switches that control a wide array of lights and other accessories. Often, even after many years, the house’s occupant never learns which switch is which. Proposal: Instead of just randomly picking a switch to toggle until the correct…
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The issue: For most snack foods, it’s easy to eat a HUGE quantity of the food in question. This is no surprise—snack foods were specifically designed to be easy to eat. Plus even after you’ve eaten a bunch, it takes a minute or two to feel full. Proposal: Here is a technique to eat fewer…
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Background: There are a few cell phone games that use real-world GPS data to control your in-game character. The most well-known are probably the two games by Niantic, Pokemon Go and Ingress, in which you physically walk around in order to move your in-game character. However, no one has yet implemented a smaller-scale version of…
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