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This is generally a blog about usability, but I'll definitely accept an item which keeps usability and simply adds the ethereal quality of "delight." These barcodes fit the bill - from Japanese firm D-Barcode, they leave the codes just as easy to scan by laser, but add a little something designed to make people smile. Hey, it worked on me!
[via Neatorama & Make]
Once upon a time, "telephones" were things that sat on desks - and when they rang, you would "pick up" the phone to answer it. It seems antiquated in an age of ubiquitous caller-ID, where you always want to see who's calling (which requires picking up the phone) before answering (which now requires pressing a button). But the HTC HD2, among other Android smartphones, has designed a bit of useful nostalgia: the phone's ringer silences (or at least reduces volume, I can't quite tell) when it's been physically picked up. This is a great idea - it reduces the time from annoyance to silence, and may even allow someone to silence a phone in a bag or purse by just jabbing at the thing. However, it's an idea that requires a robust solution - what if the user is walking or jogging, so the phone (and accelerometer) is constantly being jostled around? The ringer might be silenced before the user has a chance to hear it! The solution - which I hope was used - is only to enable this feature if the accelerometer has been stable, indicating little or no movement, in the moments prior to the ring. Great ideas deserve this kind of robust implementation!
[via User Centered]
If you're a gradeschool student using a pencil, you spend a lot of time with that little wooden stick in your hand - so hey, you might as well put it to good use. Etsy's Know It All No. 2 Pencil Set consists of normal pencils, each of which is emblazoned with a simple something that's worth remembering. It may seem like a piddling little effort at education - but I bet that every student who uses one of these actually has that fact memorized for life by the time it's sharpened down to a nub. Presence of information plus a captive audience equals memorization!
[via Make]
Crutches perform the necessary function of taking the weight off of a lame leg, but beyond that they're very inconvenient - they occupy both hands, cause mild armpit burns, and take up space both during use and, well, at all other times. Freedom Leg asks why you should involve the arms at all - why not just use the same leg farther up, where it's not injured? The result is a kind of temporary prosthesis that looks much more convenient than normal crutches - I only hope it's a little more comfortable than it looks. Check the site for a video of it in action - it's definitely impressive! If I break a leg, I know what I'm going for...
[via Gizmodo]
Product design often seems to exist in a perfect world, where people use products as intended (and the products work as intended) and everything is free of scratches, smudges, wear and tear. But hey, the real world needs good design, too - and here's a great example of it. AccidentSketch is designed precisely for those moments when things go wrong - when you've had a car accident and need to explain and document exactly what happened. A simple written account is the norm, but it's ill-suited for the complexity of an event that occurred through time and in 3-D space. AccidentSketch's well-designed drawing tools help you put the scenario together clearly and easily - though I would have loved to see animation as an option. Still, it's a great design, a thoughtful offering, and a worthy tool for when you need it.
[via Lifehacker]
If you're the type who already makes most of your decisions with the aid of a magic 8-ball, here's another cheap gadget to help take the burden off your brain: the Spend / Save Bank from Taylor gifts "rewards you one way or another" by randomly deflecting your coins into trays marked SPEND and SAVE. At first glance it seems like SAVE is larger than SPEND, which is good messaging - but if the sorting is really random, then it's false reassurance. And ironically, the first sign that you need someone or something else to make your financial decisions for you may be the fact that you wasted 20 bucks on something like this...?
[via Gizmodo]
"Web 2.0" is the term that's been coined to indicate the vast shift to user-generated, social content on the internet. That means hundreds of millions of users are out there composing text, image, and video content for websites - and they're doing that composition on the websites themselves. To make this easy, site designers need to make sure that the content-generation experience is as smooth as possible - but some are still stuck in Web 1.0 design principles. One telltale sign: a text box too small for the content it's going to receive, which leads to lots of scrolling and a frustrated user. NettiCat comes to the rescue with a text-area resizer extension for Firefox, letting users pull, stretch, and move the text box any which way they like. And hey - users improving sites with add-ons, that's Web 2.0 in action itself! The system works!!
[via Lifehacker]