Alarm clocks and usability
(flickr tag: alarm clock)
We use them every day. In fact, we rely on them. Just about every bedroom comes equipped with one. Without it, I wouldn’t know what time it was when I wake up in the middle of the night and I certainly wouldn’t be able to wake up at 5am to go to the gym. Unless you are very aware and in control of your sleeping habits, you probably depend on an alarm clock.
Considering how ubiquitous alarm clocks are, it’s surprising how poorly designed most of them are. Some come packed so full of features (radio, ceiling projection, thermometer, lunar cycles, etc.) that the main functions (time and alarm) become very difficult to use. Ok, so it might only take you 5 minutes to set the time and alarm. But what about testing to make sure it works? Or what if you need to wake up at a different time one day? What if you need to reset the alarm in the middle of the night (to give yourself another hour of sleep) without turning the lights on? After repeated setting and resetting, it’s very easy to get annoyed with your alarm clock. I think we’ve all been there.
For me, the latest annoyance is the fact that all buttons on my alarm clock are at the top and the snooze button is the largest and in the middle. There are arrow buttons to either side of the snooze button for setting the time. And on the right-most side is a small “Off” button. To turn the alarm off in the morning, you have to find and hit the “Off” button. However, my coordination is not the best in the morning and several times I’ve hit the snooze button on my way to the off button. This turns off the alarm, giving no indication that it will go off again in 30 minutes (that’s what I set my snooze to originally). I usually go to the gym soon after waking up, so I wasn’t even aware of this problem until my brother complained that my alarm was waking him up in the morning after I left. Not cool.
These types of “little” problems add up to a lot of frustration and this is why I think alarm clocks are a great example to use as an intro to usability. I first read about this idea on the World Usability Day website (see The Alarm Clock Alley Rally) and I incorporated it into the workshop I did on paper prototyping for the software engineers at Inxight.
The way the exercise works is you divide people into groups and assign an alarm clock to each one. It’s best to have a different clock for each group to get more exposure. Before beginning, you ask the groups to rate (on a scale of 1-5) how easy they think their alarm clock will be to program after just looking at it for a few minutes. Then you ask them to set the clock and alarm and to make sure it works. After recording how long it takes for each group to complete this task, ask them to rate how easy it was using the same scale as before. When I did this, most people thought their clock would be really easy to program, but they dropped the rating 1 or 2 points after actually performing the task.
[Note: This is essentially the same as the Alarm Clock Alley Rally exercise. The next part is what I added to make it into a paper prototyping exercise.]
This first part makes the point that everyday things that should be simple often aren’t. After this exercise, we briefly discussed the problems we found and the things we liked about the sample alarm clocks. The next logical step is to look at how we can improve the design.
I provided the groups with various paper prototyping materials (paper, markers, scissors, push pins, cardboard, tape) and asked them to modify the design of their alarm clock to make it easier to use. The good thing about alarm clocks is they give you an easy base that you can just tape over for the prototype. It only takes about 15 minutes for the groups to complete their redesign. When they finish, you assign “users” to each group (people from other groups) and have them do a usability test by performing the task we started with on the modified design. When I did this, in all cases, the final ease-of-use ratings were significant improvements over the original designs.
This exercise takes about an hour from start to finish and it covers some important usability concepts: evaluation, design, prototyping, and usability testing. It’s great at demonstrating how easy paper prototyping is because it only takes about 30 minutes to go from a bad design to a greatly improved (and tested) design using this method. Of course the subject matter choice plays a big role in this short time-to-completion. Alarm clocks are great because everyone knows how to use them so the focus can be on the higher-level design and usability issues instead of the object used in the exercise. The exercise also practically runs itself because it follows a logical path: identify problems, come up with a solution, prototype the solution, and test the solution.
Did I mention it’s also really cheap? Alarm clocks cost about $15 each and the prototyping supplies can probably be found in your supply closet. You can even do the whole thing without spending a single dollar by asking people to bring in their alarm clocks from home.
I highly recommend this as an intro to usability and paper prototyping. It gives people hands-on experience with the basic concepts, which is exactly 100 times more effective than listening to a PowerPoint presentation. And since it’s so cheap, you have nothing to lose. So go do it already! 
[Just for fun, check out this group on Flickr: Abusing Personal Technology]
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