Could you solve a usability problem?
Developers, designers, technologists – we all harbour delusions that one day we’ll invent something akin to the light bulb for our respective industries, don’t we? Wouldn’t be nice to have a Tesla moment, where the future is inconceivable without that invention? Why not move in baby steps and solve a smaller piece of the puzzle, by suggesting a solution to a usability problem?
Could you streamline the ever-present school transport headache so as to reduce parents’ traffic run? Or how about looking at the humble corkscrew; could it be made foolproof so that broken corks are a thing of the past?
Via Colm, I see that there’s a global Usability Challenge this August 1st. The aim of the challenge is to get as many people as possible focused on solving real-world problems, and then get them to approach the industries and service vendors with their proposals. A very cool approach to seed invention in those that wish on a star and a tidy method to push for innovation across borders.
One thing I like about this idea is that it might spread beyond people like me, who work on usability problems every day in our own little usability vacuums following the same usability principles, and out into the world where people just want to solve a problem to make it better.