It’s been many years since I worked in a supermarket but I’m sure I remember that pallet lifts had a safety device whereby it only moved if someone was controlling it. If you walked away the handle would drop, engaging a brake.
How come baby prams don’t have a similar feature? Why make it so hard to engage the brakes on a pram that you’re less inclined to bother?
Not only should such a feature be designed (though I’m confident there are already prams available that do this) but it should be mandatory. Like wearing seatbelts. As long as it’s not something stupid that requires you to maintain a grip on a bar like a grenade striker lever then it shouldn’t detract from the ergonomics of pushing and controlling a pram.
As I said, I’m sure someone’s already come up with a design – show me what’s been done!
Someone got me onto the Inception app today: an augmented reality experience that uses your iDevice’s microphone to live-process sound to simulate an Inception-like dream.
It’s really quite an awesome piece of software and not just a novelty but potentially a useless tool although perhaps not in its current game-like mode.
Some workplaces ban headphones either because they expect staff to be able to hear and answer other people’s phones (a productivity killer) or so the boss can interrupt a team member at will (another productivity killer).
I see here an opportunity to have an iPhone/iPod music player which is integrated with the microphone to help make the headphones selectively transparent whilst listening to music. Through frequency analysis the app could tell if someone is speaking towards the person wearing the headphones in which case it would pass-thru the audio at a volume appropriate for the level of the music being listened to or block the ambient noise.
As for the issue with answering other people’s phones: I think we need to stop putting phones on every single desk in offices. Nearly every single time when I take a call for myself or for others in my bay it’s not an urgent issue and should have been emailed through so it could be handled at our convenience and it’s not worth having a phone that kills productivity daily just for that one urgent issue a year that needs my immediate attention … and even then, an email would have sufficed if email alerts could be overridden for ‘high priority’ flagged items.
Anyway, I digress. I think there’s an opportunity for making music listening and headphone wearing more palatable for office environments and I think the Inception app is a good proof of concept for the idea so check it out!
For how many decades have the main controls of a car been the accelerator and brake foot pedals? Isn’t it about time we experimented with some other forms of control?
For example, the throttle below is based on that of airplanes except combined with a form of cruise control. It would also control the brakes so if you’re going at “60″ (60 km/h) and suddenly yanked it back to zero the ABS would kick in and come to a complete stop as soon as possible.
What do you think of this concept?
And what do you think of my first attempt at using Google SketchUp?
Internet Banking is pretty basic, and I’ve had the, uh, pleasure of using the Internet Banking facilities provided by all the major banks over the years.
What I would like is an Internet Banking web application that goes a step further that actually helps me manage my money and budget.
What I would like to see is the concept of virtual accounts where I can create as many bank account partitions as I want to help me dice and slice my money. I would love to be able to create a temporary virtual account for “Car registration” that I can put money into to save to pay for car registration. I would love if I could set a due date and required balance on that account so when I log in Internet Banking could tell me I need to put at least $50 in that virtual account to get it back on track so I can meet the savings target.
Perhaps I could set up automatic debit to move an amount of money into that virtual account either regularly or whenever it detects a deposit that exceeds a certain threshold (ie my fortnightly salary).
I would love it if I could tag sums of money and earmark them for specific purposes. Money for car servicing, birthday presents, insurance, dental check-up, groceries, fuel, parking. I struggle with budgeting. The disconnect between how I want to manage my money and what I have to work with (ie one account that just has the label “Savings” and a dollar sign followed by some digits) means I’m not very efficient or rigorous with money management. It’s partly a personality and behaviour flaw but also a design opportunity.
Of course as this is all virtual it’s all handled within Internet Banking. Nothing needs to change with the underlying banking infrastructure. If I have five virtual accounts with $100 in each then as far as EFTPOS is concerned it’s still just a single account with $500.
Would you find something like this useful? There’s probably already something like this out there – which banks are doing it and how effective is it? As with all software there’s scope to implement this really horridly.
Even though most buildings and facilities provide dedicated bathrooms for disabled people there’s also often a cubicle in the main bathrooms that are larger, equipped with handrails and open outwards instead of inwards.
Firstly, I don’t think referring to such cubicles as “disabled” is the most appropriate label because such cubicles are useful to plus-size people who aren’t comfortable using a standard-size cubicle and obesity or largeness isn’t generally regarded as a disability. Then again I don’t see why we need to use the label “disabled” anyway, but that’s another issue.
I often have to use a disabled toilet cubicle when other cubicles are in use and the first issue with their design is the lack of a door handle. With normal inward-opening doors you can push them open from outside and push them closed from inside – you don’t need any special affordances on the door to push. However with the outwards opening doors on disabled cubicles often all you have is the edge of the door and the latch which requires a decent grip with just a finger and thumb to prevent the door opening again when closed once it hits the jam. Not easy.
The next thing I don’t understand (and I believe this isn’t as common an issue) is that the disabled toilet cubicles in our building don’t have toilet paper roll holders! They’ve been replaced by hand rails for elderly people and Zimmer frame or crutch users and clearly they couldn’t decide where to relocate the holder to so simply omitted it. Glaring design flaw.
Put handles on the doors and don’t forget the toilet roll holder!
The detrimental effects of malfunctioning fluoro lights are well known and felt by thousands of office workers every day but it’s often almost impossible to detect the rapid flickering of a dying fluoro that causes headaches.
I have no idea if something like this is already available or how the technology for it might work but it would be awesome if the cover over fluoro lights or on the tubes themselves could respond visually to the specific rapid oscillations that are indicative of a bad fluoro and that cause the headaches by filtering and altering the colour temperature of the light or tinting the light.
Would be much easier to identify the source of your headaches and request the replacement of a fluorescent light if it’s coloured magenta instead of the usual sickly green.
Photo courtesy of Chris Campbell.
Not being an owner of a handgun and basing this only on what I’ve seen in films I don’t know how accurate this is to reality but it seems to me a major problem with firearms is running out of ammunition. Obviously you can’t have an endless clip, even with a machine gun, so running out of ammo is inevitable but the fact that you have to count the rounds off in your head to know how many bullets you have left or just wait till your gun stops firing is both poor design and a significant safety issue, especially in a combat situation.
You probably don’t want any visual indicators distracting you from aiming, so why not build something into the grip of the firearm that gives the person a tactile clue as to the amount of ammunition left? I did think of a number Braille-like dots that count down the rounds, but I suspect that the ghost perception of an indentation in your palm might remain once the bump has retracted into the grip, so probably the better way is to go the other way: maybe even a countdown of the the last three rounds in your clip: 1 bump = 3 rounds left, 2 bumps = 2 rounds left, 3 bumps = 1 round left. It’s possible though that the counter-intuitive implementation of a countdown represented by a counting up might confuse. Worth testing the idea out though. Of course you don’t need any indication that you’re out of ammo because the handgun slide stays open when the clip is empty, so that’s pretty obvious. But perhaps might need something for rifles.
Many cars that I know of (except my partner’s Subaru Impreza) allow you to keep the headlights on after you’ve removed the keys. My MINI Cooper S will go down to just parking lights but either way your lights will eventually drain your car battery … hence why we often see NRMA in the carpark after work especially after a rainy morning recharging batteries for people who’ve left their lights on all day accidentally.
It’s possible car manufacturers have addressed this issue with newer models but if not why would they allow a car to drain its batteries? Sure, let the driver make the decision to keep the lights on after turning the ignition off for circumstances such as road-side rescue or unsafe stopping but power them off before they drain the batteries. In what circumstances would someone want to keep their headlights on for as long as possible even if they then can’t start the car? Doesn’t make sense to me.
If I could, I would fix this.
This is only the second time I’ve used one of these Finish dishwasher cleaner products and I only noticed after discarding the used contained the instruction to mount the product in a plate rack position with a crossbar to prevent the cap from slipping into the line of fire of the rotating spray arm.
It’s a reasonable instruction and I should have read the label more thoroughly. I checked – the cap doesn’t interfere with the spray arm in our dishwasher, but there is one simple thing the company could have done to this product so as to impose one less instruction on the customer:
Recess the cap or add plastic extrusions on either side of the cap to force it to sit up in the tray, negating the need for a crossbar.
That’s it. Not that hard. So why didn’t they think of this?
A few months ago I upgrade from my Nokia 6300 to an E55 Navigator. Not that there was much wrong with my 6300 … it had even survived being dunked in beer and several hard falls. That phone was tough.
My E55 is ok. Has some nice features – GPS is a big plus for me (no more walking along holding my laptop with a 3G modem draped around my neck). Feels a little top heavy, wish I didn’t have to hold it sideways with two hands to take photos and wish it had a recent numbers list for SMS instead of having to hijack the Groups function to create a shortlist.
However the one thing that annoys me most is continually bumping the quit/close key when trying to press “p”, which occurs often when texting while walking which I do quite a lot.
I’m stuck with this phone for the next 2 years so I’m going to have to do something about it and having disassembled my 6300 several times to fix a malfunctioning key I’m confident I can tweak my phone to prevent this either by adding a small stub under the quit/close key to make it harder to bump or by reducing the sensitivity of the quit/close key by intentionally damaging the PCB-mounted switch under the keypad or increasing the distance between key and switch by introducing a buffer or shaving some material off the stub under the key.
I plan to attempt this surgery on the weekend – will let you know how it goes!
General
cell, e55, hand, holding, humanfactors, interface, keypad, mobile, nokia, phone, technology
