UI / UX
User interfaces and “user experience” ideas.
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Background: It’s often hard to assess the total cost of renting vs buying. For example: Renting a house (plus renters’ insurance) versus owning a house (plus homeowner’s insurance, property tax, and maintenance, and possibly offset by property value appreciation) Owning a timeshare versus renting a vacation house once a year Taking a taxi / using…
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Background: In olden times, recordings could only be viewed at home by either personal movie projector (extremely rare) or VHS player. Nowadays, digital video makes it possible for anyone to get on-demand video without the hassle of low-quality video and rewinding tapes. But perhaps the “VHS experience” is integral to getting the full effect from…
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Background: An emoji overview: Fig 1: Current Apple emoji skin tones. Available tones vary by emoji font designer (e.g., Google, Microsoft). Emoji people were originally only available with a light skin tone. Recently, more skin tone options have been added (Fig 1). However, they are just a recoloring of the original emoji, and thus may not have realistic…
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Show how classy your phone app is with REAL fake GOLD text! Gold everywhere = high class operation.
custom font, font nerd, gold font, gold leaf, helvetica, hiragino sans, my precioussssss, paypal, paypal font, phone font, sell your gold, sell your worldly possessions and adopt the life of a wandering ascetic after you give up your gold, shiny gold, specular highlight, trade in your gold now for terrible rates
Background: PayPal recently announced a new font that they are quite proud of, which, according to the designer (https://klim.co.nz/blog/paypal-sans-design-information/), features “understated elegance” and shows the “confidence and foresight to buck the neo-grotesque groupthink of their Silicon Valley brethren.” Fig 1: Left: PayPal’s new custom font. Right: this approximation in “Hiragino Sans” (a default Mac font)…
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One weird application of the “invisible fence” dog collar that’s setting the world of Internet comments on fire! And possibly also setting people on fire, depending on the amperage involved.
dog collar, fix internet comments, hexagon commission, Internet, internet comment shock collar, internet commenting, internet shock collar, invisible fence collar, lizard people, no need for comment moderation with this one weird trick, possible electrocution hazard, quadrilateral commission, shock collar, trilateral commission, usb compatible
Background: The staggering degree of stupidity and general mean-spiritedness of Internet comments is a well known and undeniable phenomenon. But what can be done to prevent the anonymity of the Internet from causing people to write inhumanly monstrous things in Internet comment sections? Fig 1: Even if your web site is about historical Danish model…
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Background: Modern video games are, with a few notable exceptions, generally designed to minimize the amount of irritation and aggravation that the player experiences. The issue: However, one flip side to the general “smooth sailing” experience of gameplay is the lack of any “stake” of the user in the gameworld, which reduces the tension and…
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Background: There are two common orientations for toilet paper; “over” (sheet falls forward, away from the wall) and “under” (sheet falls backward, next to the wall). Fig 1: Two toilet paper roll orientations. Left: the proper “over” orientation, for civilized individuals. Right: the incorrect “under” orientation, favored by subhuman beasts who can barely be considered human,…
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Background: Over time, old files tend accumulate on one’s computer. However, cleaning out a computer is an annoying and time-consuming task. In the past, storage increased at a rate such that old files could be safely ignored forever. But modern laptops may actually have less (although faster) storage than ones from five years ago.…
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Background: You’ve probably encountered the situation where you can hear your phone’s alarm going off, but are in a situation where it isn’t easy to actually pick up the phone to tell it to turn the alarm off. For example, if you’re in the shower, tending to a boiling cauldron, or driving a…
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Background: When packing for a trip, it’s easy to forget something. One way to solve this problem is to make a list, but even that requires planning ahead of time and is prone to error. Proposal: To solve this problem, we will adopt a technique that is seen in prison kitchens (at least, the one…
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