Here’s why I want to take Apple UX people aside and pelt them with olives: when an alarm goes off, I’m never sure which button totally turns it off. If it’s a timer I set during the day, the STOP button is big and centered. Below that is “repeat”. One would assume the alarm that wakes you up in the morning... eilloh.net: hollie.micro.blog
@hollie I think it’s 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 “intuitive” must mean for folks running their software, with the sort of results you’ve described, rather than finding out what user’s intuitions actually are. There is also evidence which says these designers depend heavily on “training” 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? 😄
@devilgate I don’t, I want to turn off the alarm every morning. And a function should stay the same. If I did want to snooze the alarm, I’d want to use the snooze button, which shouldn’t be the same as “Stop”. 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 isn’t 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 I’m 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 I’m in on Zoom. Because it wasn’t Stop, it was Snooze.
A button’s function should stay the same. What other button or lever or anything do we have in our daily life where the function changes and it’s considered “intuitive”?
@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 ‘default’ action: what would happen if you pressed Return on a keyboard-based system. And it’s the thing most people would most often want.
Which matches my preferences, but not yours, so it should probably be an option.
@hollie I’m 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 you’re 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 shouldn’t change depending on whether you’re 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 keyboard’s Return key doesn’t shift to auto-sending email between the hours of 6am and 9am.
@hollie 😆Indeed 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 it’s confusing. I know I’ve hit the wrong one (the one I didn’t mean to hit) often enough.
@chrisfoley It shouldn’t require conscious thought. Also this massively screws you up if you’re taking a nap, say, in the middle of the day. If the alarm goes off, and you’re 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 you’re fucked - you just hit STOP instead. Because the app taught you a conflicted muscle memory and you weren’t awake enough to hit the right one.
@devilgate Interesting…I’m pondering this…..I guess I would disagree with the designer who would say that. :)
