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.

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.

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.

This is a sketch book from a Dyson engineer showing the thinking process when designing the company’s revolutionary vacuum cleaner. The notebook is part of the exhibitions in Tokyo Designers Week 2011.

It’s very intriguing to see that how the designer used the sketch book to gather ideas and visual thinking with simple doodles. No worries about structure, fidelity, quality; all it matters is quick and free drawing, or even putting your coffee mug on the notebook and leave a mark. So analog, so beautifully human.

Treadmills are becoming more than just a surface for your to run on and exercise. With loads of functions and program controls, it’s getting more and more complex to operate. The picture above is a typical treadmill with buttons and screens that almost resemble a cockpit of a jet fighter. But what if you just want to get started right away? One solution designers came up with is a “Quick Start Button”. It’s purpose is to bypass the setup process and start rolling the treadmill right away.

On the other hand, a treadmill needs to have an emergency “Quick Stop” button, which allow user to stop the machine immediately in case of emergency. Both the “Quick Start” and “Quick Stop” has the same functional priority, only opposite purposes.

Question is, in order to make it easy recognizable and operable, the buttons has to be physically bigger than other controls, and very easy to understand at a quick glance without reading the text label on the button. So they need an intuitive icon.

The “Stop” button icon is relatively easy since there is an international standard “red stroke in a circle” symbol to follow. But it is trickier for the quick start button.

Back to the example treadmill in the photo, there’re two design decisions I find puzzling:

(1) Instead of the standard red colour, the Stop button is in orange.

(2) For the “Quick Start” button, it make sense to use green to imply a positive message of “go ahead”. But the icon is a 90° rotation of the stop button. It’s creative, but not very easy to understand especially for first time users.

Suggestions:

• green circle with a solid dot inside
• the standard “Power On” icon (Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_symbol)
• an illustration of a running man

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?

Here are some thoughts on elevator door buttons and design inspirations I got from the observation.

Common issues:

1. Language – there’re thousands of words in different languages to communicate the “open” and “close” functions. English is [open/close], Chinese is [開／關] or [开／关] (simplified Chinese), Japanese is [開／閉],…etc.
2. Icon – to solve the language problems stated above, it’d be better to use icons that is universally understandable regardless of the language barrier.
3. Button location – Some elevators has the open/close buttons located at the top of the button panel. While one person is pressing the [open] button to keep the door open, other people sometimes has to squeeze under his/her armpit to press the floor buttons. That’s quite inconvenient and could be embarrassing.
4. Mutual exclusive states – “open” and “close” are two mutually exclusive states of one object: the door. Logically, you only need one control to operate the door. Think about a light switch: one switch is connected to one lightbulb to turn it ON or OFF. However, perhaps when the engineer first designed the elevator, the two functions was identified as two separate tasks where each has to be implemented and engineered separately. Thus, the two buttons are mapped to control the two functions.
5. Accessibility – what if the user is colour blind or unable to see? What if the light goes out and you can only rely on touch?

A good solution

1. Language independence.
2. Every control should have at least two or more ways to communicate its function.
• Colour (green is open / black is close)
• Icon (outside pointing arrows is open / inside pointing arrows is close)
• Physical dimension (wider button is open / narrower button is close)

Real world example

Model-view-controller is a well-known programming pattern that is used to organize software code. It suggests code separation within a software into three roles: input (model), process (controller), and output (view). When the software gets really big, such organization of business logic makes it manageable, as well as easier to maintain and extend in the future.

However, many new programmers and non-techy people find it difficult to understand the concept. Here is my attempt to visualize it by using the metaphor of supermarket:

Model – product info and price data retrieve from external source, such as the supermarket headquarter, supplier and so on.

View – shelf arrangement, decoration, poster, price tags, and things that could be affected by the data (product info and price). View is a passive element, which doesn’t automatically update by itself.

Controller – the staff in the store, who would constantly update and rearrange the shelves, decoration and so on base on the ever changing external data provided to them.

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

(Apology if I missed you and please let me know so I’ll update it)

iOS Developer Meetup Group link: http://www.meetup.com/TokyoiOSMeetup/

What message to you perceive when you see a person bowing at you?

The meaning of bowing is quite significant in eastern culture, and especially important in Japanese daily life. Depending on the context, bowing could mean apology (when you bump into someone), appreciation (after you made a purchase from a store), and greeting (equivalent to saying hello and good morning). In the company I work that, for example, we often have meetings with guests and clients. When the meeting is done, our team would walk the guests to the elevator door and wait for the elevator with them. Once they stepped into the elevator, all team members will make a bow at the guests until the door closed. That is to show deep appreciation and good business manner.

But here is a challenging scenario I encountered one day when having lunch in a Japanese beef bowl restaurant YOSHINOYA. Near the cash register, there was a sign with an illustration of a staff bowing with a smile, some Japanese text and then logos of two popular NFC payment card “WAON” and “Suica”. Let me explain why I think the signage design could be confusing, especially to foreigners who cannot understand Japanese:

Full Body Gesture — it is pretty clear that the illustrated character is doing a bow at person who’s reading the sign, there’s no ambiguity about it. However as mentioned before, bowing could mean appreciation or apology.

Facial Cue — this one is subtle to pick up but important nonetheless: on the face of the character we could easily identify the eyes in the upper part of the face; however what is that curved line below it? It is a smile, or is it a nose where the character is now bowing with his/her head down?
(a) If the line is a smile, then the character could be making a pleased facial expression, indicating that the the subject of sign is to thank you for using the indicated payment methods.
(b) If this line is the nose otherwise, then the character is making a large head dip which ressemble a deeper bow. That can be interpreted as a big apology and further understood as “we do not accept the payement methods”.

Japanese text — obviously, to those who cannot understand Japanese, this instruction would have no use in explaining the message.

Logos at the lower right corner of the sign there are two logos of the payment systems. The logos are neutral and don’t convey any information of the acceptance of the payment methods.

Answer: 「当店ではWAON、Suicaはご利用いただけません。ご了承こださい」(meaning: this store does not accept WAON and Suica cards. We appreciate your understanding.)

My Suggestion: stick to international standard to indicating “No”. It’s boring but it works.