UI / UX
User interfaces and “user experience” ideas.
-
Background: Convenience stores occasionally sell hot dogs from a heated glass enclosure with a conveyor belt-like mechanism inside that rotates the hot dogs and moves them closer/farther from a heat lamp (Fig 1). The Issue: Unrelatedly, people often find it hard to get to a comfortable temperature when sleeping at night: it often feels like sleeping…
-
Background: Certain types of office jobs, such as data entry, are limited by the typing speed of the operator. This is generally acceptable for humans, because human hands are adequate for keyboard typing. The smallest common keyboard has 61 keys (a so-called “60%” keyboard: https://www.google.com/search?q=60%25+keyboard). So the maximum possible human key coverage (Figure 1) is…
-
Background: A car owner may sometimes be ticketed for parking in a location that was valid, but became invalid due to a highly specific restriction (e.g. “street sweeping every 2nd Tuesday, 8–9 AM”). These “rare” restrictions can be hard to remember or notice. Proposal: Thanks to modern omnipresent surveillance infrastructure, a person’s cell phone can now…
-
Background: Many programming languages allow extremely long user-defined variable and function names. Frequently, companies will have a specific policy on naming: for example, forbidding abbreviations and requiring descriptive variable names (e.g., “CALCULATE_TOTAL_COMPOUND_INTEREST” would be OK, but “COMPINT” or “CCI” would not). The Issue: Normally, this makes sense: if someone has to read a bunch of…
-
The Issue: People occasionally dye their hair a different color. This process is a bit time-consuming, and it’s not always immediately clear what the results will be. Although it’s possible for a person to edit a digital photo to preview a new hair color, this type of simulation lacks the immersive three-dimensional quality that would…
-
Background: A “pill organizer” (Figure 1) is a container for vitamins, medications, or anything else that a person wants to remember to take on a recurring basis. The Issue: There are many other recurring tasks that could also benefit from a weekly organizer. For example, according to the lobbyists at Big Vegetable, everyone should eat…
-
Background: Frequently, a person planning an event (e.g. a party) will have a hard time pinning down the guests as to whether or not they are definitely planning to arrive. This can be annoying for the host: it’s hard to plan an event without knowing how many people will show up! Additionally, most people have…
-
The issue: The presence of windows in a house is a major factor in determining of whether a house is dark and cavern-like or bright and uplifting. Unfortunately, it is usually impractical or impossible to add windows to a home after its has been constructed. Additionally, windows generally have a negative effect on climate control:…
-
The Issue: Sometimes, people go to new locations and feel a sense of unease (Figure 1), due to their lack of familiarity with the local surroundings. Proposal: Thankfully, the solution is easy! The tourist can simply tour while wearing a VR that has been calibrated to change the exotic foreign landscape into a familiar environment…
-
Background: Every so often, a ridiculous story comes out about someone driving 400 miles to the wrong location because they went to the “right” address (“123 Snake Street”) in the wrong city. In the ancient “paper map” days, this type of mistake would be nearly impossible, but modern GPS systems make it possible for a…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 