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Reinterpretation of setting the alarm experience by tangible design

Rolling Times

Our project is a reinterpretation of setting an alarm experience.

Phones are in every moment of our daily usage. It is a fact that we check our phones all day while watching tv, eating and naturally before going to sleep too. We set the alarms for the next day, or even we have preset them, we want to check it to be sure before sleeping in. However, those checkings lead to other kinds of checking other apps such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, e-mails, etc. We scroll through social media in the dark and strain our eyes to look at the screen until we fall asleep.

Besides, at the moment of setting the alarm, on the layout of apple, you need to type on the keyboard to set time. There are some problems, mainly regarding consistency. If you tap the hours, you can change only the hours, and if you tap the minutes, you can type in the whole thing, including hours. Editing resets the set time, essentially the new alarm. It requires starting over.

In addition to some user interface problems, the overall experience is quite unintuitive; therefore, the haptic sensation is missing.

There are also some other downsides of setting the alarm by phone in terms of health before sleeping. First, looking at the screen where you see all of the alarms as lit causes anxiety and stress. Second, although your phone has a blue screen filter, looking at bright-lit night can affect your sleep quality.

Therefore, as a team, we decided on turning the bad experience of setting the alarm on the phone into a more intuitive and tactile experience by designing it as tangible. Our proposal was:

Why wouldn’t we turn the alarm experience into something that unwinds the users, let them take their time and relieve their stress by having a tactile experience?

Then, our HMW became:

“HMW turn the alarm setting experience into something that unwinds the user, lets them have a playful moment and reduces information noise by having a tangible experience, away from the screen?”

We went through brainstorming using exercises like crazy eights to generate more creative ideas. Actually, we managed to come up with inventive and broad concepts. We sketched out the best ones and talked over them together, adding our opinions.

Some of the ideas were more about playing with the time and leading it. What if time was something that you could pull, shapen, squeeze, throw, roll or stretch? Thinking outside of the box and subtracting setting the alarm practice from regular clocks helped us bring about original ideas.

One of our mentors, Ottavio, joined the discussion, too, and we decided to go along with two ideas: the placement of the time block and rolling of the time stripes. Then, considering the time limitation, we agreed upon the one we liked most.

So the idea was to place the time indicator on a baseboard divided into columns that show minutes and rows that show hours.

To determine the design, we started to build some mockups.

Since labelling is used to classify the alarms, sometimes according to the priorities, we also deliberated over adding different shapes for labelling into the design.

Trying the layout as three dimensional, we thought using a ball instead could better bring the users haptic sensation. The ball’s shape is also a perfect sphere that touching and perceiving it might have a powerful influence on users before having asleep.

However, once the idea got concrete, the designed layout looked too complicated and might be confusing for users. An option was to decrease the minutes, and then it led us to divide the minutes into four; so that the range was going to be fifteen minutes. In this way, with this limitation, the interface looked more soothing with less but direct options.

Although we figured out the appearance, there were some problems regarding how the system works. The time indicator was a sphere, and every intersection point it touches was supposed to be lit by the specific colour we were going to pick later. So there were two questions in the minds:

Because of the fact that most distance sensors are costly and do not measure accurately, we had to think of a strategy that would work mechanically.

Then, two different solutions came to our mind. One of them was to build a triangle out of Jumper DuPont pins at every intersection point. So that if the ball touched one of them, the system could generate an electric current. The second idea was to make holes on the board and knit a wire through each intersection points. As a result, if we filled the holes on each intersection point with wire, the electrical circuit could be run through those conductive points.

Because copper is easy to bend and its conductivity is high, we considered copper to use as the wire in our design. After having a bunch of discussion on the surface material, we decided to go on with plexiglass by carving it in the laser cutter. It was because a 3D printed surface could be inadequate to give the sleekness. On the other hand, a transparent one could transmit the LED light clearly. Therefore we chose the transparent one.

We modelled every layer in 3d modelling programmes, and having a preview of each component helped us a lot to detect the faulties. Then, we did laser cutting.

After taking out the cut layers from the laser cutting, we knitted the wires into the top plate.

After knitting the wire, we had to take off the wire coating on touchpoints for the top layer. For the layer underneath the top plate, we placed the led strips. The wire was connected to Led strips, and Led strips were connected to the Arduino component.

Overall, in our prototype, we used copper wires, LED strips, Arduino UNO, 10 Ω resistors, jumper wires, breadboard, a push-button and a capacitor.

In the final product, we preferred to use blue to show the current time, and green is the time that the user is going to set.

The plate where the user places the ball to set the alarm is divided into four rows in parallel. Along the bottom line, there are numbers from 0 to 12 to show the hours.

Users can only set the alarm for quarters and on the strokes of hours. By giving this restriction, we didn’t only consider minimizing the design but also create an unstressful, unwinding experience before going to sleep.

We tested the prototype with several people. In general, the feedback was highly positive. Our design was found nice and easy to understand. Specifically, people liked to touch and feel the ball. We also received some suggestions for further development.

One of them was Ali, and his first expression was excitement. He said:

“It’s pretty fun and playful. When do you want to wake up? Just roll the ball and find out!”

He founded it easily comprehensible and added:

“Easy to understand even for a child. Just leave the ball on the place when you want to wake up.”

He also stated that he would want another function that there were some paths, like time paths that he’d like to play without a game concept.

Our other tester, Ann Marie, compared our design to the alarms in the market by referring to her bad experiences.

“You are tired at the end of the day. You don’t have the energy. The last thing you do is setting the alarm, and it is likely to go wrong if it is problematic. It shouldn’t be complicated. I think this is nice because it is so simple, very straightforward.”

“Also, not only in the phones but also in the analogue clocks, the buttons are too cranky and makes a horrible sound. It is not nice to touch. I like the heaviness of the ball and how the ball feels.”

Moreover, she looked from a different perspective and proposed that the design could be quite helpful for blind people.

“Blind people can also use the design, and numbers could stand out more, and they could just roll the ball rather than trying to type it on the phone. Plus, when I was a child, I remember from myself that it was difficult for me to understand how the clock works; this might be a pretty playful way of teaching, though!”

Another tester Nur:

“I like how I interact with the clock, which I have never thought that I have had!”

This project allowed us to gain a new perspective to improve flawed experiences.

It was compelling to taking something that already exists, understanding how it was intended to work and how people use it. We tried to break the user flow down into tiny blocks and realized actually how changing the order can affect our experiences.

Although we had some problems that pandemics brought during the project, our motivation was high to come up with a good solution, and in the end, we are content and satisfied with the outcome.

Special thanks to our mentors again.

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