Taxi Meter in Abu Dhabi

I was in Abu Dhabi for a small project during May-June 2010. There were so many things I was impressed with. One of them was taxi service.

The service is managed by private companies who selects the drivers from different regions (India/Pakistan/Bangladesh etc). Once the driver passes 2 driving exams (which is veeee...ry tough) he is allowed to work in the city. He can work as much as he wants as the taxi remains with him 24 hrs. They work on commission basis. Daily they need to give 300-350 Dhs to the owner and rest is their earnings.

The taxi meter were very self explanatory. When you board on taxi, meter shows the display on meter and the red light on top of the taxi to know the people who are waiting at taxi/bus stand.

It shows the details like the taxi Drivers Photo, Name, License Number, distance traveled in km, time since boarding, instructions to fasten the seat belts, recording card inside the meter to record all the conversation, day/night, whether taxi is waiting or on road and fare. Customer need not to ask anything about the fare :)

Click on image to read

 
There is an instructions sticker at the same side to all the taxis where you get to know the minimum charges, day and night charges and charges per km and all the information the passenger might need.

I Love.......Crome's Paste and Go...

I love this Google Crome's feature "Paste and Go" on its location bar. It saves one click white pasting a URL.

I Love.......Scribd Status

I was uploading a document on Scribd and I loved the status update they provided. It showd a count down of the documents which were in queue and the status was getting updated very fast.

In below image red circled number showing the document status...

My smart eraser

During my summer vacation after 12th exams, I joined a drawing class at Chandrakant Mandare Art Gallery. He was a well known Marathi Actor and artist. He taught us a powder shading technique to draw portraits. During that training we learned so many useful drawing techniques.

One of them is…
 

To erase a small part of line drawing or to give a highlight in dark shaded area we use to use eraser and eventually erasing the adjacent lines. In case of putting the highlights using eraser, it was more frustrating as it used to erase the other part of drawing which was not desirable.

See below images. A sliced piece of eraser is fixed into ball pen’s body to serve as a tip. You can call it as an eraser pen.

1)    This method was very effective, useful and was very convenient to erase from parts like eyes, eyelashes and shades of hair without spoiling the drawing. (For detail parts check drawing section at http://www.pradipkhekare.com)
2)    As it is a pen, it gives accurate results. The area adjacent to the eraser tip is visible on paper which is not with regular rectangle eraser.
3)    And most important, it feels GOOD!

Strange things in my office

In every office you can find these strange things.

We have cubical system in our office where multiple project teams sit. There is a common switch board for entire hall, where the switches are laid out horizontally as shown below.

The lighting preference for every project group is different. Some wants a particular light to be on or off. So to switch a particular light, we need to check all the switches to get the results as there is absence of natural mapping in between switches and lights. (Usually we face this issue either at home, office or somewhere else)

The design solution would be very easy and would require little common sense. Make the groups of the switches according to the layout of the office. On broad level there could be four different groups. Left, Right, Top and Bottom.

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Now see the below image. What is a problem with this? Apparently there is no problem with the water cooler. When you go and try to take the water, you need to bend a lot till your water bottle is full, though its a good exercise:)

Easy solution, make a base for cooler so that we can comfortably take the water.

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One common example is of doors which opens inside. There is a vertical bar to pull/push the door. On the outer side of the door has an instruction “PUSH” and inside side has “PULL”.  Sometimes the instructions are absent leading to more confusion.

Here the same handle design is used to do two different functions pull and push (Like my speaker buttons), which leads to confusion. Can’t we design it in such a way that we get to know which side to push and which side to pull without instructions?

Fuel Indicator

While coming to office I was little worried for my scooter. The fuel indicator was inside the red bar. I was not sure how much the fuel is left and how far I can go. Fortunately I could fill my fuel tank from nearby petrol pump.

One question came into my mind which was quite obvious after this experience, that why my fuel indicator didn’t show me the exact remaining fuel volume?

When I reached the office I went to parking area and checked the 2-wheeler's indicators and to my surprise all were more or less designed in the same way. It was showing the "Empty-Half and Full" range of fuel.

I checked the Hero Honda Passion, CD-Deluxe, Splender, Hulk, CBZ, Honda Activa, Unicorn and Dio, Bajaj Pulsur, M-80, Avenger and Discover, TVS Fiero, Apachi and Scooty. All were having similar design.

Below are some of the images.

I started thinking of a better alternative and I immediately could design my concept of fuel indicator. Below is the image.

 

1)      It shows the total capacity of the vehicle i.e. 10 liters.
2)      It shows the capacity of the reserve tank here it is 2 liters.
3)      It shows how much fuel is remaining or emptied. It is 3 liters in above design.


Now a days I see the digital indicators in latest models. Haven't yet explored those.

In latest car models indicators show “Distance to Empty”, where you get to know how much distance you can go with the remaining fuel. That’s a good sign!


 

Design Problem with my Speakers

Recently I read a book “Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman and suddenly I am seeing lots of design problems around me :)

I have a set of speakers which has 2 buttons power On/Off and volume. See below image.



1) The buttons are labeled
2) The functioning of the volume button is suggested by groove mark
3) Volume button is large in size than the power button
4) And both buttons has same shape

How will you operate these buttons?

The power button operates as a push button and turning the volume button clockwise/anticlockwise increases/decreases the volume.

So here the two buttons with similar cylindrical shape are operating with different style. Don’t you think this is a bad design?

Now while operating the power button, whenever I try to push it, the speaker gets pushed back instead of only button due to speaker's light weight so every time I have to support it with another hand and then operate it.

Now see below image of another speaker



The buttons are on top of the speaker.

Both buttons are different in shape and have different functionality. The definition for them is very clear, one needs to push and the other needs to turn up or down.
 
How do you find it? I found it very easy to operate :)

Story of a farmer and doctor

A farmer named Atmaram comes to Dr. Bhave along with his son Suresh. Suresh is suffering from a skin disease. Dr. Bhave does a routine checkup and gives him medicines. The medicine contains one bottle for external application to apply onto his skin and other to consume it orally.

After two days Atmaram comes to doctor again complaining that there is no visible results with the treatment. He told doctor that there are problems with the medicines. When he applies the liquid to skin, it attracts the ants and the other liquid is bitter in taste that his son refused to swallow it.

After checking the bottles and asking which one he used for what, doctor came to know that Atmaram used the bottles in reverse order. The one which needed to apply externally, he gave it to consume and the other for external application.

Then doctor gave him a tube to apply externally and tablets to consume. The problem is solved! (Sakal, Sunday, 4th April 2010)

There was no problem with the treatment. But surely there was a problem with the interpretation of the farmer. He could not remember which one to use for what due to similarity of shape, form, liquid state of the medicine etc.

Then Doctor gave him a tube for external application and tablets for consumption where the farmer could identify and differentiate the form, shape, color of each and give it to son without any problem. It reduced the memory load for the farmer.