Touch the world

Blind people rely on screen reader to read the content on the screen. The screen reader works perfectly with text, but for images and complicated websites, it cannot well present the content. The blind people have no idea what is really on the picture, or how does the site lay out.



The proposed assistive technology is to project whatever on the screen to a tactile uneven surface, along with touch sensible interactive screen reader. So the blind people can use their hands to have a much better idea of what is on the screen.


(Image reference: Ubi Interactive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu2XH5p_hMM&feature=youtu.be)

Furthermore, for real world scene, it can also be converted and projected to the tactile surface. It can be portable, so blind people can put it in the pocket and travel to anywhere, enjoy the beautiful world just as everyone else.

Lip-reading Glasses

Though many people with hearing disability wear hearing aid, they usually still need to rely on lip-reading to assist them understand what people are saying. But this becomes extremely hard when they are in group communication (e.g. meeting, group lunch, group chat, etc.).  Even speech recognition techniques can not handle the multi-people speech very well.

This proposed assistive technology combines speech recognition and lip-movement recognition through a pair of glasses, and present the content in front of deaf people's eyes through augmented reality.

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.