UI / UX
User interfaces and “user experience” ideas.
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Background: Hundreds of years ago, a cool looking numeric system was invented for writing numbers from 0–9999 in a single cryptic rune: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cistercian_numerals. In Figure 1, we see how two such symbols could represent a phone number. Proposal: By making use of these strange-looking numbers, ”boring“ mundane activities—like dialing a phone number—can become more exciting…
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Background: It’s difficult to appreciate the amount of energy that is consumed by a citizen of a modern industrial economy. If we only consider household electricity, a “reasonable” amount of consumption (ignoring air conditioning or heating) can be more than 5 kilowatt-hours (~200 watts of average usage over a 24-hour period). A non-bicycling-enthusiast adult can…
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Background: Many computer games award “achievements” or “trophies” to the player upon the completion of various challenges: e.g. “Achievement: Finish Level 4 Without Taking Damage” or “Collect Over 1,000,000 Doubloons.” Players will often dedicate substantial effort to these tasks, despite the fact that there is generally no in-game reward for them. Proposal: What if we…
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The Issue: After a person purchases a gigantic (yet economical) tub of snacks, they’re probably doomed to devour them in short order. But what if there were a way to harness human laziness to prevent devouring of junk food? Proposal: Behold, the solution! Just put an excessive number of binder clips on the container that…
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Background: When specifying a time, some positions may have either one or two digits (e.g. “1 PM” vs “11 PM”), but other positions always have a leading zero, no matter what (e.g. “1:01” and “1:11” both have three digits). Proposal: The inconsistency in digits is unnecessary and leads to weird sorting behavior. For example, if…
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Background: Many foods require a certain minimum amount of cooking time, yet there isn’t always an obvious visual indicator of “done”-ness. The Issue: As a result of the lack of a visual indicator, a chef must laboriously inspect food by (for example) cutting into it, poking it with a fork, or tasting it. These time-consuming…
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Background: Many types of commonly-available vitamins and medicines are deadly if ingested in large quantities. Unfortunately, small children generally do not understand the concept of “LD50,” and may eat an excessive number of pills. It also doesn’t help that many medications are candy-like in appearance (e.g. compare a coated Advil tablet to an M&M). The…
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Background: People frequently listen to music during their day-to-day activities. In olden times, a person was limited to whatever was playing on the radio, but in the post-iPod world, it’s very straightforward to load up an entire day’s worth of personalized music ahead of time. However, such music can’t react to the events of the…
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