Juan Sanchez

Why is the process of recycling so hard? Paper, plastic, trash, compost, etc. and all their respective bins can drive me crazy.

I was recently at a local CostCo doing a user interview and had to skip lunch beforehand. On the way out I thought I’d grab a hotdog to curb my hunger. After devouring my meal I went to throw away my trash and I was confronted with a situation similar to what’s shown in the image below.

How clever, I thought. There’s some nice color-coding, instructions and silhouettes to help me map what items need to be discarded where. This should be a piece of cake, but then things broke down.

I was overwhelmed by the feeling I might make a wrong decision and put something in the wrong bin. I went to throw something in one bin, then changed my mind or double-checked once I realized there weren’t others of that item in there. Eventually, I think I put everything in its right place, but I could see others got frustrated and just dumped everything in one bin.

This experience made me think about whether or not the concepts used to help patrons map their trash to the appropriate bins could have been pushed further. I thought the color-coding and silhouettes were key components, but they only got me half way there in terms of reaching my goal. It also didn’t help that I was also in a rush.

In fact, what immediately came to mind was a toy I’m sure we all remember from our childhood; shape sorters.

So… What if the paper plates, cups, silverware, napkins were all color-coded to match the bins? For further enforcement, shapes could also be used to make a connection to the trash and the bins. For me, this would make things easier to understand and may even bring a degree of playfulness. Here’s my artistic rendition:

Would it be more expensive to make this solution happen over what’s currently in place? I’m sure it is. However, how expensive is it for people to sort out misplaced trash later down the line? How much is it to print out those banners of instructions? Is the savings worth the additional “strain” on customers?

In the end, I’m sure something like this might be cost prohibitive and hard to maintain, but I know at the time a system like this may have helped me out a bit. I really think using the silhouettes provided the strongest recognition for me, but it didn’t solve the problem of materials.

For all I know there could already be a solution to this. I thought posting my thought process here might be worth while considering I seem to be having a lot of things like this popping into my mind. We’ll see if I can make a habit of it.

As I’ve been working with the iPad I’ve been intrigued by some of the UI differences between it and the iPhone. One of the first things you notice when playing with the iPad is the popovers that display in context of the element you’ve interacted with. On an iPhone, the same interaction would take you to a new view.

This got me thinking about how popovers might be used outside of applications and in the homescreens where your app icons live. Specifically, I was thinking of how I could use popovers to peek at specific content from an app instead of launching the entire application. For example, peek at recent emails, see what AIM buddies are online, etc.

Sure I could fire up the application and navigate to the information I’m interested in, but I’m lazy and am not interested in doing that. So, here’s some mockups of what I’m thinking. The popover could be displayed by double-tapping the app icon.

Peeking at Twitterific to see only recent tweets

Peek at AIM to see who's online

See what the current weather is like

The person who creates the app can dictate what shows up in the Peek functionality of the app, but the goal would be to have a minimal amount of interactivity. Otherwise, what’s the point? The user could just launch the application.

It would also be important to keep content to a minimum. For example, don’t show an entire Twitter stream, just show the most recent tweets. Maybe even limit it and have the option to see more tweets that launches the app.

Customization of each Peek view might be interesting, but it may not be necessary. For example, setting Twitterific to show recent replies versus recent tweets.

Dashboard and Widgets on the iPad

When you think about it, this feature mimics in some ways the Dashboard in OS X. So, if these views are already created, why not have a Dashboard app on the iPad?

To add these Peek views as widgets to the Dashboard app you could drag the icons onto the Dashboard app icon similar to the way folders work in iPhone OS 4. The only difference would be that the Peek views appear in the Dashboard now and the actual apps themselves don’t leave the homescreen.

It’s just an idea

Like any quickly executed idea I’m sure there’s flaws in this, but I thought it’d be fun to mock up. You can see the full resolution mockups on my Flickr page.