Watch out! You are in my way! - To design a better car horn

This is a car steering wheel with the horn at the center. To use the horn, one has to use one hand to push hard at the button at the center, and use the other hand to hold tightly the steering wheel.

But, when we have to use the horn, we are usually in an urgent traffic condition, and we want to use the horn to warn others to pay attention. But under such cases, it is not safe or convenient to free one hand to push the horn button. People tend to hold tight the steering wheel with both hands to make the car more under control.

Here is the problem: how to design the car horn so that people can use it naturally and conveniently under urgent cases?

Here are some brainstormed design ideas. They are not necessarily be practical or efficient, but they are recorded as a process of design thinking.

- The horn button can be hidden inside the steering wheel rim, activated by strong hand gripping. Under urgent cases, people tend to grasp the wheel rim tightly, which would automatically trigger the car horn.


- The horn button can be located at one side of the steering wheel, as highlighted in the red circle above. So people just need to free one finger instead of freeing one hand.



- Similarly, the horn button can be hidden inside the brake. Only when the brake is pressed hard, would the horn button activate.


- Similar to blind spot detection, the car can automatically detect dangerous occlusion or maneuver, can use horn to warn the driver or other cars/pedestrians.
- The horn can also be activated by the shout (or dirty words :P) of the driver. Most drivers would say some particular words under urgent traffic cases. Each individual can configure these "activation words" to use them to activate the horn.

Where are the train stations? - Design critique of Amtrak website

One day I was making an amtrak reservation, and found this weird design.

While selecting destinations, I would like to know where are those stations (e.g.: How far is it from  "San Francisco - Financial District" to my destination). After clicking the location icon in the red circle, I expect it to show a map of the stations, but it pops up a screen showing the station codes...

- It uses this familiar location icon, but doesn't meet the expectation
- The search query doesn't provide an easy way for user to find out the location of stations. I have to search online or on google map, which requires much more working memory.

It could be much better if it allows people to enter their specific destination address, and shows an interactive map with all the nearby stations on it.

Consistency Violation Examples

Amtrak data selection

The first calendar is for the departure date, the second calendar is for the arrival date. However, the departure calendars are November and December, while the arrival calendars are December and January, which are not consistent. One would naturally assume the calendars are the same, thus makes mistakes.

Gallery

This is the photo gallery of a housing website. We click the left/right arrow (in the red circle) to see previous/next photo. But the position of the arrow is not consistent throughout the gallery, which is hard to click for mouse users.

Storage Alert! What should I do!

If you are using a macbook pro with 128GB storage, you might be familiar with this:



This is an alert from Mac OS about the disk storage. I click "OK", and then what? It doesn’t direct me to the right places to free spaces.

Moreover, even when I go to a directory and want to free some space, the interface of the directory (as shown below) doesn’t show the folder size! I have to right click the folder, click “show info”, then it tells me how large it is. It takes a lot of working memory to solve the storage issue.




[Redesign] Storage Alert

- Instead of letting user just click "OK", it directs users to the place ('Finder') to free some space. And the files in 'Finder' should have visible 'size' property, and be sorted by size.
- It provides a drop-down menu listing the files that have not been used for a long time, sorted by the size, based on the assumption that user may want to delete some old files or large files to free space. User can click on the file to see the details and decide to keep it or not.

Don't get lost in the web browser tabs

Crowded tabs  :(

I surf on the internet, browsing all the interesting stuff. And suddenly, I find my web browser tabs look like this..



We can hardly see the tabs and remember why we get there. Clicking on each one of them also gets harder.

Visible tabs  :)



For the same issue, Safari lists the tabs in a sliding window. The content on the tab is visible, and we can use the touchpad to slide through all the tabs.

See all tabs!



Activated by touchpad, we can see all the tabs as well as the hierarchical structure in this world-in-miniature feature. We can quickly have an idea of what we have opened so far, and jump to some pages very quickly. Brilliant!

Furthermore...

I would propose to visualize the origin of each open tabs, showing where each tab comes from. Since sometimes we don't care about the title of the page, but the reason that makes us get there. For example, the blogger.com came from the Google search results, and we may want to see what else we got from the same search results.

Turn on the lamp. Don't try twice!

	Confusing gearwheel rotation direction This desk lamp uses a gearwheel as the on/off switch.  It turns on if it is rotated in a particular direction, and turns off if rotated further in the same direction. Nothing catastrophic happens if rotated in the wrong direction. But.. I never remember the right direction!
	[Redesign] Directly manipulated lamp switch The switch is hidden inside the lamp cover. Intuitively, we open the cover to turn on the light, close the cover to turn it off.