Hereās why I want to take Apple UX people aside and pelt them with olives: when an alarm goes off, Iām never sure which button totally turns it off. If itās a timer I set during the day, the STOP button is big and centered. Below that is ārepeatā. One would assume the alarm that wakes you up in the morning... eilloh.net: hollie.micro.blog
@hollie I think itās right: you most often want to stop a timer; you most often want to snooze an alarm. Well, I do, anyway.
@hollie I think this may be a case of designers using their intuition to decide what āintuitiveā must mean for folks running their software, with the sort of results youāve described, rather than finding out what userās intuitions actually are. There is also evidence which says these designers depend heavily on ātrainingā rather than intuition.
Of course, there may be some merit, in this particular case, in making it just a little difficult to slam the snooze button and sleep through, say, an important keynote address, right? š
@devilgate I donāt, I want to turn off the alarm every morning. And a function should stay the same. If I did want to snooze the alarm, Iād want to use the snooze button, which shouldnāt be the same as āStopā. Would you build a car where the parking break lever turns on the parking brake SOMETIMES, but other times it turns on the hazard lights?
@bkryer But it isnāt difficult - the Snooze button replaces Stop in the morning, which means I hit what my sleepy brain and muscle memory has been trained to think of as Stop (the top button), and then Iām up and moving around and my phone alarm goes off again, waking up my husband or just running the battery down, or disturbing a class Iām in on Zoom. Because it wasnāt Stop, it was Snooze.
A buttonās function should stay the same. What other button or lever or anything do we have in our daily life where the function changes and itās considered āintuitiveā?
@hollie I quite understand your point. Maybe the two screens should be laid out differently.
I think the idea is that the big orange button is the ādefaultā action: what would happen if you pressed Return on a keyboard-based system. And itās the thing most people would most often want.
Which matches my preferences, but not yours, so it should probably be an option.
@hollie Iām okay with that layout, as it seems to require conscious thought on whether to snooze, stop, or repeat. That double take can be critically important on mornings when I have to get up at 5pm, like yesterday.
If youāre going to pelt me with olives, I would prefer Castelvetranos please.
@devilgate I agree the big orange button is the default action, but the default action shouldnāt change depending on whether youāre hitting the button in the morning or at any other time. A keyboard is a good example. The buttons always do the same thing, unless you modify the keystroke somehow. A keyboardās Return key doesnāt shift to auto-sending email between the hours of 6am and 9am.
@hollie šIndeed not. My guess is that a UX designer at Apple would say the alarm and the timer are different things. Different functions, whatever.
But I agree itās confusing. I know Iāve hit the wrong one (the one I didnāt mean to hit) often enough.
@chrisfoley It shouldnāt require conscious thought. Also this massively screws you up if youāre taking a nap, say, in the middle of the day. If the alarm goes off, and youāre supposed to get up and turn on Zoom for a meeting in half an hour, and you hit the top button because you think it will give you 5 minutes of snooze - well youāre fucked - you just hit STOP instead. Because the app taught you a conflicted muscle memory and you werenāt awake enough to hit the right one.
@devilgate Interestingā¦Iām pondering thisā¦..I guess I would disagree with the designer who would say that. :)
