Knob Dials vs Buttons - Car Heater

Sparkles, (our silver station wagon) has a dial knob for the temperature control. I have a problem with this dial. Every time it's cold out, I want to just literally dial it all up. That's got to make it heat up faster right? ... Yea, Nope.

Typical affordance design issue.
I associate dials with the ability to turn something up immediately. Like a cook top stove. (OK, our stove top is not a typical stove top, it's an electric wok, courtesy to my electronic geek hubby, but it gets the point across eh? ;-) )

Stove tops become hotter as you turn the dial up as the flame gets bigger. The problem with the car heater, unlike the cook top stoves is that the knob just turns up the temperature control, not the amount of hot air being blown in. In my usage, changing the desired maintained temperature is not a common action. I do however often want to feel warmer or cooler faster via stronger air current blowing at me. So in my case, I would rather not have the temperature controls be associated with the most easy to use button controls.


Design Solution.

• Turning up the dial increases the amount of air blown into the car
• Temperature control should be switched to the up and down buttons where the current buttons to increase the amount of air blowing in. 

Adobe Student Suite - Does not include real time collaboration

Adobe suites/apps are one of the most highly pirated software out there. Larger businesses can afford to pay for the Adobe suites, the [design] students and small businesses are the ones hurting from the ability to pay for the products legitimately.

Instead of turning a blind eye on the [design] students' companies who will in the future pay by bringing the product/tool to their work environment or the 'dumbed' down Adobe products which may be good enough for family photos/videos, here's the proposal:

Now with the technology to enable real-time collaboration, let that be the premium service one pays for: real-time collaboration backend on the Adobe suites. (Easier said than to engineer real-time collaboration for vectors and direct pixels, but hey, this is a 5min idea.  Microsoft OneNote began to do so on the client side and now on the web with the Office Web Apps...)

Real-time collaboration between adobe files are essential for the productivity of design teams. Right now design teams need to work around this by breaking up our books into tiny singular files so we can have different members of the team work on different pages of the same 'book'/'project' in InDesign.

Students who typically are working alone, learning to master the apps, don't require the real-time collaboration with other cohorts. Let the cost of the 'professional' design features in the Adobe suites be now part of a base affordable price (say~$50).
Medium/Large Businesses then are paying for the premium to support complex real-time collaboration service.

Freemium++

Picture Ornaments

Love how easy it was to trace old family picture calendars to the template and insert it into the ornaments to hang on the tree. :-)
Quick & easy, personalized decor~

Tofu in the Making

Gunk from soymilk. Johnny's freaked out. I assure him, it's tofu in the making!

Laundry Nudge UX

Left a mountain of clean laundry on sofa to motivate me to fold it when I get home. Got home and gladly leaned on it instead, lazed around and watched bad tv. Unfortunately/luckily, laundry of jeans is not very soft to rest on. Wanted room back to be be able to lay on the soft sofa pillows. So now I'm forced to fold laundry... Sigh i guess it worked...

Gummy Bear Vites

There are 55 more Bears in this bottle!!!

Pancake Blaster

Great idea but feels very wasteful to end up with an empt aerosol can that is not easy to recycle.
Especially since not much batter can fit in a can.

Please think of the full cycle of the product, manufacturers.