Garrett M. Vonk

I’m a huge fan of design features that anticipate and compensate for human error. I often enter numbers I want to remember into my phone while I’m speaking to another party. (As in, “Go ahead and read me your number, Bill; I’ll put it in my phone right now.”) When I finish a call, I instinctively close the flip, and with most phones, the number I had entered would disappear. My phone, however, remembers it, knowing that it’s likely I just forgot I had taken down a number. When I open it back up to make another call, that number is smiling back at me, ready to be saved in the phone book. It’s a minor feature, but it matters.

Along the same vein is the feature that allows me to close or open my car windows even after I take the keys out, before I open the doors. It definitely saves me from having to re-start the car if I just need to crack the windows in the heat, or close them to prepare for rain.

This has been Tuesday’s Random Praise of Technology.