04Feb / 2012

JR Ticket Site – Secret Question for Sign Up

The Japan Railways (JR) has a ticket reservation website at jreast.eki-net.com. Just like any other web services, they require users to register an account to make train reservations, check information and so on. A nice touch on the account sign-up form though, is the choices for the secret questions. Here’s the translation of the list:

好きな電車 (Your favorite train)
好きな乗り物 (Your favorite way of transportation)
思い出の駅 (A memorable station)
思い出の観光地 (A memorable sightseeing location)
好きな食べ物 (Food that you like)
嫌いな食べ物 (Food that you hate)
卒業した学校 (The school that you graduated from)
好きなチーム (You favorite team)
ペットの名前 (Pet’s name)
親の旧姓 (Mom’s maiden name)

What I like about this list is that it is relevant to the training experience. When filling in this sign-up form, this little part reminds me of why I want to open an account in this web site – I want to book a trip to travel. Small detail, but makes the sign-up progress a little more present and personal.

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25Jan / 2012

Automatic Sanitizing Revolver Toilet Seat

This is an automatic sanitizing toilet in a public washroom located near the Hankyu Arashiyama Station (阪急嵐山駅).

Official description at the facility:

The toilet seat, toilet bowl, and floor are automatically cleansed after each use.
Fully equipped with heating and air conditioning, background music, baby seat, handrails, mirror hand soap, toilet paper, hanger, dust bin, sanitary napkin disposal etc.
In case of need, there is a direct line to our administration center so you can call us 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

My thoughts on this facility:

pretty interesting to see such engineering effort to create this fully automated self-cleaning public washroom. However, I cannot quite understand what justifies the construction of such self maintaining facility, especially when this is built near a train station rather than a remote site.
As a user of this washroom knowing there is no human operating it at most of the time, it is reassuring to see the telephone near it with a guarantee to be able to contact this administration centre 24/7. More importantly, it’s the most helpless moment of all when people are stucked in washroom
Thinking further from the previous point, as we’re at the age of many self-serving and automated systems such as ATM, Online Banking and vending machines, it gives a sense of reassurance when there is a human operator providing assistance in case of emergency.Another example is the Loppi self-serving ticket machine at the Lawson convenient store (http://www.lawson.co.jp/loppi/). In spite of the pretty comprehensive touch interface, there is also a telephone right next to the screen, so that you can always get a human operator to ask questions in case you need assistance.

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12Jan / 2012

Clever Shopping Mall Poster Design for Year of Dragon

The tag line of this poster is「思わずびっくりかえる、お得です。」(before your realizing, [time] changes suddenly and great deal comes)

Despite of my bad translation, there are two things that I think are clever in this poster design:

1. In the tag line, the word かえる (KAERU) has two meanings:
(a) 「変える」Changing from one state to another
(b) 「蛙」Frog

2. Along with the “frog / change” word play, the illustration above resembles a sitting frog. If you flip it upside down tho, it appears to be a dragon head. The illustration combines three themes into one presentation: frog (KAERU), change (KAERU), and the symbol of dragon.

I wish everybody a happy 2012. I will continue my journey to discover and document beautiful designs in everyday things.

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06Nov / 2011

Logo for LED Street Light

LED light is becoming more and more commonly used in household and public area, replacing the traditional florescent and sodium vapor based lighting systems. LED is energy efficient, bright and long lasting. With these many advantages, many cities are trying to promote this technology for a wider adoption. The picture above is a street light installed near Kawasaki JR station.

However, there is currently no international standard logo for the LED lighting technology. The most commonly seen logo so far is the 3 English alphabet “LED”. It is still a new territory for designers to come up with something that can communicate the concept and technology. For this street lamp near Kawasaki station, the designer attempt to do so by using 7 circles in a radial arrangement. Can you get the idea from the logo?

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16Aug / 2011

Tokyo iOS Meetup – Aug 2011

On Last saturday, the monthly Tokyo iOS Meetup was held at Genesix company lounge “Ajito” in Shibuya. It’s my pleasure to be able to help organize the venue for the meetup group, so that everybody can enjoy sharing knowledge and have fun in a relaxing environment and well-equipped venue.

The topic of this meetup is “Apps You Admire”. We heard some intriguing discussions not only related to iOS applications, but also customer experience, fun projects and electronic payment systems. Here are some topics that we’d talked about:

Matt’s Developer Presentation (Meetup Profile) – pretty high-level Cocoa programming stuff (maybe ask him for the prezi later?)

AR chopper and iPhone controller – a bit discussion on how awesome technology has evolved that user can play with such sophisticated toy without breaking the bank. Video here.
I can’t wait to see various hacks to come just like people hacking Roomba the vacuum cleaning robot.

Anton on the Square payment dongle – convenient and powerful POS solution is what Anton admires. From the discussion on credit card, we went on talked about some electronic payment systems such as Bitcoins, M-PESA which is based on SMS, USD (used to be connected to gold standards but not anymore), and even using light-bulb as a new currency

Calvin: Grocery Shopping in Korean Subway using QRcode (previous blog post here) – how the idea focus on customer experience, effective use of waiting time for trains, and the use of existing technology.

Bachir: Tiny Wings – same game mechanics, polished vs unpolished. The gameplay of Tiny Wings is arguably identical to WaveSpark, yet the execution and polish of this app is won the hearts of million of iPhone users as well as much money for it’s author Andreas Illiger.
Related post at http://gamesfromwithin.com/all-it-needs-is-love.

Philip: Pulse for iPad – this app offers attractive interface to read news on iPad. The smooth horizontal scrolling effect is one of the things that interest our developer participants. Some suggested that it is using UITableView with
CGAffineTransform to achieve such result.

Non was wondering how to get feedback from users so he can improve his products.

Folks who came to the event:

Tasuku Maeda
Dan Fulton
Chris Wynn
Calvin C. Chan
Mark Makdad (@makdad)
Kaz Yoshikawa
Steven
Tonny Xu
Todd Musgrove (@toddmusgrove)
Hafid Bourhim – UI/UX Designer
Bachir (Facebook)
Non Umemoto