Philip Haine's articles on Product Vision, Innovation and Design

Designs to Steal

Ideas for specific designs. See also: Quick Ideas for quick & dirty ideas.

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Streamlining the BART QuickPlanner interface

A couple of tweaks to the BART schedule planner would make it much more useful.

Reading lists for Web Browsers

It should be easier to store pages to read later.

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Making Backlit Keyboards More Useful

Can we tweak a gratuitous feature to make it a little bit more functional?

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Buttonphobia, UI Friction, and the iPhone

Sacrificing simplicity for the appearance of simplicity.

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UI Friction and Apple’s Front Row

Reducing the needless UI overhead in Front Row.

Panning & scrolling with a mouse by tilting

Tilt the mouse to pan and scroll

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User Interface Friction

UI friction needlessly wastes the user’s energy on delays and busywork.

Separate slurs from the content in message boards

If you can’t beat down flame wars, how about formalizing them?

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Redesigning the Buffet Line

Applying design lessons between the analog and digital worlds

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Captain Kirk’s Computer

Add speech and Wikipedia is it.

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Web interface to cellphone configuration

Why are we still laboriously entering phone numbers into our cellphones’ chintzy UIs?

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Making efficient use of big displays

GUI standards, apps and web pages have not kept up with ballooning displays

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Automatically Exchanging Encryption Keys

Let’s let email clients deal with the hassle of exchanging public keys.

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Bring related windows forward during Alt-Tab

Here is a tweak to the micro-interaction of Alt-Tabbing

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Resize browser text without losing your place

Ever lose your place when zooming into a browser page? It’s not just you!

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Easier layer selecting in Photoshop

Selecting objects in Photoshop can be a pain. Here’s a remedy.

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The curse of the magnetic strip

Murphy would say that the right way to insert a magnetic card is the fourth one you try.