Awesome User Experiences: A conference hall where you won't miss a single minute even if you need a bathroom break

A few weeks ago, I attended a seminar on corporate marketing. The seminar was held at the Marunouchi Building, which is a building in a skyscraper district in Tokyo. There was a hall where the lecturers did their presentations and outside of the hall was the lobby and the restroom. What was cool was that both the lobby and restrooms had speakers that broadcasted the mic inputs in the hall.  

So, if you needed to go to the restroom in a middle of a session, you could still listen to the session in the restroom so you wouldn't miss a single minute.

Imagine if they could do something like that in theaters, but then that would require each screen to have its own restroom.

Thanks for reading SWG!

Link:
Marunouchi Building Hall and Conference Square (Japanese)

Awesome User Experiences: The browser in Nintendo Spot Viewer

I covered the Nintendo Spot service for DS in Japan earlier in July. Basically it’s a service that lets you download a viewer/browser on to your DS to browse information and download games at McDonald’s.

The viewer/browser of Nintendo provides an awesome user experience for lefties. The browser lets you switch the vertical scroll bar from the right side to the left side (and vice versa) by pressing a button on the top of the scroll bar.

You can see the browser being demonstrated in the following YouTube video.

It’s a very neat feature for pen / stylus based interfaces. I also think it should be implemented in computer operating systems too. For example, Mac OS X doesn’t let you configure the position of the vertical scroll bar. A lefty who uses one of the Wacom tablets would greatly appreciate this feature.

Awesome User Experiences: MacBook and Headphones

Awesome User Experiences is a new series of posts on really cool user experiences. If you have any awesome user experiences with gadgets or anything, please share it!

I’d like to start off the series with MacBook and headphones. I think it works with any Mac that has OS X, but since I haven’t really confirm it on any other Macs, I’ll stay with the MacBook. Let's begin!

Lousy User Experience:
Remember those times when you plug in your headphones, and when you attempt to play something, your ear is blown out by the loud volume.

Awesome User Experience:
When you plug in your headphones in a MacBook, the volume level is automatically lowered so that you won’t blow out your ears.

It appears that whenever you plug in your headphones, the volume level is changed to an optimal level for your headphones. So even if your volume level is originally muted, after your plug in your headphones, the volume level will be adjusted. This makes sense since it is assumed that if you plug in your headphones, you want to listen.

It is also nice to know that if you unplug your headphones, the volume will return to what ever it was before. If it was muted, it will return to the muted state. If it’s on full blast, it’ll return to full blast.

Neat, heh.