Month: February 2008

User Experience – Fare Conversion Table

After months’ of discussion, finally the flag-fall fare of all taxis in town raised by $1 yesterday. Since there is only a rise in flag-fall fare but not the fare per kilo-meter, the new taxi fare is therefore quite easy to calculate – just add $1 to the meter reading.

And since there is not enough time to re-calibrate all the meters of all taxis, so the local government’s transport department issued a taxi fare conversion table to display in each taxi for passenger reference (see below).

Taxi fare table

Yesterday in one taxi trip I had a chance to read this conversion table – it read something like this:

$ 15.00 -> $ 16.00
$ 16.40 -> $ 17.40
$ 17.80 -> $ 18.80
….

Yes you read it right, it just add $1 to all the small numbers in the table above. I mean, to make this piece of paper a lot more useful, why not just print one simple but bold sentence ?

Add $1 to the meter reading, thank you !!

Now you can tell, how our government officials use their brain …

Did you know … shift happens ?

Two very good set of slides … “Did You Know” is a set of slide about the globalization and America’s future in 21st century. And “Shift Happens” is a stylization of same set of slides. Two different approaches but same important message. Enjoy !!

“Did you know” by Karl Fisch, a teacher from Colorado.

“Shift Happens” by Jeff Brenman, a graduate from NorthWestern University.

Voices

Months ago I blogged about a voice that’s so moving from Taiwan, and today I found another voice with similar charisma. her name is Joanna Wang, also from Taiwan and again, hearing is believing.

Let’s start from here
Lose the past
Change our minds
We don’t need a finish line
Let’s take this chance
Don’t think too deep
All those promises we couldn’t seem to keep
I don’t care where we go
Let’s start from here

Sometimes, I wonder why the “Superstars” in our city can waste their precious time in TV shows, movie making, naughty picture taking etc. etc. but not some material time in singing – i.e. their career.

When a phone is not a phone

The charismatic leader Steve Jobs once said the killer application of a mobile phone is … making phone calls. He said it last year when he introduced the iPhone and sure, iPhone changed the world a lot in terms of mobile device usability and applications. But seriously, most of time I found people are just playing with their iPhone as a toy or a fashion icon, instead of making phone calls. Look around, and you know what I mean.

I can imagine a mobile phone with good UI, good application is a powerful device and platform; and I firmly believe mobile commerce will be a totally new ball game (unlike other says, mobile commerce is only an extension of Internet eCommerce).

But before all that, get ready to spend more time to play with your phone, change the look, desktop, widgets etc. etc. See the following, another new UI system from Samsung F480 …