Kickstarter is always good place to see courageous and reformer people. Most of the successful Kickstarter projects prove one thing: Project backers are the ones who can imagine the prospective improvements to their lives with the final products. And these improvements are all about their experiences. It can be rude to say but UX design sells (look at what Apple products do).

In Kickstarter you could find a lot of examples, here is one: Zipi by Frank Cho.

What did motivate him to start this project? I guess it is his poor earbud experience. In order to see and solve a real life problem you should either have an empathy with your users or have the same problem by yourselves.

Let's think about the times which we were trying to get over our earbuds no matter if we are designer or not: Switching between usage and non-usage of earbuds is hard. At the same time they are always problematic to store. The Kickstarter project Zipi comes addressing both these problems. It eases switching between usage and non-usage; and eases to store the cable junk.

As pointed out above the best tool we as designers have to never part ways is the empathy (or having the same problem). This tool helps us depict the problem and discover a solution. User experience design is not just polished screens for users, it is a connection between the user and the product. It may come in many forms: sometimes a simple button in UI and sometimes a string with a magnet. So UX design is to make users feel better what they use and get more out of it. The best designed products provide its users self time, a.k.a "me times" instead of messing up with the product or manuals.