Online Accounts for Children -- Power of Attorney Option

Instead of today's process where the parent has to falsify a child's age (above 18) in front the child when creating an online account, what if all online accounts allow the option to add 'Power of Attorneys'.

In today's world, it seems inevitable to provide our children access to the powerful tools online -- Google Calendar, Skype, ...

What if we can set up affiliate users who can view and monitor another user's account?
The set up can be as simple as, who else can 'log into' this child's account.

More advanced integration can involve the affiliates having options to [Flag] or [Hide] inappropriate posts. The affiliates can also be limited with the inability to send email under this child's account, thereby setting respectable boundaries and consent between the child and parent.

 


This idea can be extended for any account in case of an emergency or a passing of an individual (elderly parent). Loved ones just need to log into their own account, and since they are flagged as 'Power of Attorneys' to these individuals' accounts, enables the loved ones to access the other's account and gather the needed information.

Ideal Corporate UX Structure - A mix of a Central UX team And Partner Large UX teams

As I sit and listen to the annual All Hands, there are a lot of small teams who want to hire ux talent. The corporate goal is to hire global top talent. I can see it difficult for these small teams having difficulty attracting top UX talent.

So, what if the company developed a central UX group in conjunction with large sister ux teams dedicated to the company's top products.
The designers in the central ux team would divide their time 70 or 20% on the smaller product teams while dedicating the rest of their time supporting and developing the corporate ux brand and design standards.

The separate ux groups would be for product specified teams that require a larger and fully dedicated team of designers.

By having a central ux team, we can attract top talent to work on the central brand yet also can support the smaller teams.

The responsibility, egos, and power could be better balanced.

So instead of debating whether a company should have a central ux group or disparate ux groups, have both structures. There are pros and cons of both strategies; if we support both, we can have the best of both methods and hopefully cancel out the cons the silo-ing of the 2 structures caused.

Missing Children on take out Coffee Cups

Instead of broadcasting missing children in milk cartons where young children may not necessarily know what to do about discovering a lost child, what if we broadcasted lost children on coffee cups where thousands of cups are bought by adults each day. We would get even more viewers on each day and every day.

Perhaps more lost children could be more quickly found...

On a similar idea, we could also post Wanted criminals. However, that might be a bit disturbing and have people start the day on a bad note.

Coffee cups can also be a great advertising platform for generic distributors who do not need to show their brand on the coffee cups.

Knob Dials vs Buttons - Car Heater

Sparkles, (our silver station wagon) has a dial knob for the temperature control. I have a problem with this dial. Every time it's cold out, I want to just literally dial it all up. That's got to make it heat up faster right? ... Yea, Nope.

Typical affordance design issue.
I associate dials with the ability to turn something up immediately. Like a cook top stove. (OK, our stove top is not a typical stove top, it's an electric wok, courtesy to my electronic geek hubby, but it gets the point across eh? ;-) )

Stove tops become hotter as you turn the dial up as the flame gets bigger. The problem with the car heater, unlike the cook top stoves is that the knob just turns up the temperature control, not the amount of hot air being blown in. In my usage, changing the desired maintained temperature is not a common action. I do however often want to feel warmer or cooler faster via stronger air current blowing at me. So in my case, I would rather not have the temperature controls be associated with the most easy to use button controls.


Design Solution.

• Turning up the dial increases the amount of air blown into the car
• Temperature control should be switched to the up and down buttons where the current buttons to increase the amount of air blowing in. 

Adobe Student Suite - Does not include real time collaboration

Adobe suites/apps are one of the most highly pirated software out there. Larger businesses can afford to pay for the Adobe suites, the [design] students and small businesses are the ones hurting from the ability to pay for the products legitimately.

Instead of turning a blind eye on the [design] students' companies who will in the future pay by bringing the product/tool to their work environment or the 'dumbed' down Adobe products which may be good enough for family photos/videos, here's the proposal:

Now with the technology to enable real-time collaboration, let that be the premium service one pays for: real-time collaboration backend on the Adobe suites. (Easier said than to engineer real-time collaboration for vectors and direct pixels, but hey, this is a 5min idea.  Microsoft OneNote began to do so on the client side and now on the web with the Office Web Apps...)

Real-time collaboration between adobe files are essential for the productivity of design teams. Right now design teams need to work around this by breaking up our books into tiny singular files so we can have different members of the team work on different pages of the same 'book'/'project' in InDesign.

Students who typically are working alone, learning to master the apps, don't require the real-time collaboration with other cohorts. Let the cost of the 'professional' design features in the Adobe suites be now part of a base affordable price (say~$50).
Medium/Large Businesses then are paying for the premium to support complex real-time collaboration service.

Freemium++

Picture Ornaments

Love how easy it was to trace old family picture calendars to the template and insert it into the ornaments to hang on the tree. :-)
Quick & easy, personalized decor~