Design Crux Takes On The Alarm Clock
In Donald Norman’s book, The Psychology of Everyday Things, a design exercise is given. A manufacturer calls you in to design a new combination product integrating:
AM-FM radio
CD player
Telephone
Answering Machine
Alarm Clock
Desk or Bed lamp
And they are asking you, the designer, to figure out whether a TV screen and remote appliance timer (for a coffee pot) can be added.
While I doubt there would be a manufacturer who would create such a product, I wondered what would happen if I took ten minutes to apply some of my ideas to this exercise. Stop here if you want to give it a ten minute try yourself, or continue reading for the surprise ending.
Adding tactile icons to
buttons can reduce user error.
A design approach might concern itself with cool styling, and the ability to play CDs, or 500 channels of Internet radio and phone (Norman’s example being a bit dated). The usability approach would look at typical tasks, like using the controls. Such usability testing might reveal only thirty percent of users can actually use the controls to set the alarm and use the other functions, fewer still can do so in the dark by feel, as many would. This is not trivial, and could cause the product to fail all by itself.
Desirability, however is something else again. As is information about user objectives, and balancing the need for the manufacturer to differentiate itself in an overcrowded marketplace. Often the objective isn’t readily apparent from the tasks used to achieve it. The feature, the alarm, is used to wake up because the user can’t do it themselves reliably. What is the real user problem? It isn't waking up, it is not sleeping well enough in the first place. In only minutes I turned up a lot of evidence to support this conclusion.
How could things be different? We can focus less on the five percent of the time users spend with the product, and concentrate on the hours in between. We can focus less on the part that makes users throw their clock against the wall — the alarm — and focus on making your users happier because they slept better.
Our sleep timer, as we might refer to it, should take into account sleep related problems. The objective would be to create an environment most likely to produce a deeper, longer sleep cycle in the time allowed…
…The light level in the room should be as close to total darkness as possible. However, one of the problems people have is the lack of broad spectrum natural light they receive before sleep.
…External noise can be a problem as can temperature.
…Tension and anxiety can tighten up muscles which prevent relaxation.
…One of the biggest problems people have is waking up early then watching the clock, which creates just enough anxiety to prevent further sleep.
Marshaling my considerable minutes of research, I might suggest a combination of the clock unit and a special heated massage pad which applies full spectrum lighting to the skin. (Light is vital to the melatonin production needed for sleep.) Since exposure time can be as little as one hour to elevate melatonin levels, light should not be a problem for the sleep environment. One extra feature which I would suggest is to blank or dim the clock display for several hours before the alarm goes off. With any ability to restore the display given a timeout function during this period, to prevent clock watching.
The traditional alarm clock concept is something like one hundred years old. Which makes it a great example of taking a steam age idea through several technological revolutions essentially unchanged. What is an alarmclock for, waking up or enabling users to get a good night’s sleep? Both are valid ideas — each resulting in a different kind of product design.
However, while manufacturers will gravitate toward what’s cost efficient and easiest to manufacture, people will kill for more sleep. They won’t pay as much for a design that nudges the outside edge of human perceptable sound quality. And contrary to popular opinion, users aren’t looking for 500 more music channels …they’re looking to better manage (and reduce) the choices they already have.
Why does a magazine like BusinessWeek or universities such as Harvard, MIT’s Sloan and Stanford see design as a business advantage equivalent to technology or operational efficiency?
Technology convergence without design coherence results in a chimera product. Convergence only happens in the user’s mind. Adding a clock to a mechanical pencil or pen doesn’t fit the user’s context, it fits the manufacturer’s. Meanwhile the user is trying to remember what the date is, for a form they are trying to fill out. Asking designers for microscopic buttons to change the default pen–clock to show the date is “painting polka dots on the Edsel.”
Styling after construction is very different from branding through design. One is superficial, the other a profound shift to design–based management thinking. In an era of plentiful technical skills, manufacturing efficiencies and cheap labor, only comparative advantage through design presents any kind of barrier to competition.
Design is inevitable. A product design satisfying both user and company objectives is not. You can work with people who have developed over 200 products, received more than 80 patents, formed more than 60 licensing arrangements with 40 patent applications pending approval. To get started contact Design Crux.
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Resources
- This Gear Live review puts it well, “The thing about the SLEEPTRACKER is that it doesn’t provide anything “fun” or “cool” per se. Instead, they have developed a product that actually improves your quality of life.” Products like SLEEPTRACKER, SleepSmart, and aXbo integrate the context of user lifestyle into product design.
- The Reverse Alarm Clock is innovative enough to make you want to rethink the basic assumptions of all product designs.
- The Static! Project looks at energy as a design material like plastic or textiles. Using ambient information design techniques to create a power aware cord which persuades a change in user energy consumption. By visualizing power used, a feedback loop is created allowing users to gain control over energy consumption.
- Ask any iPod user what they like the most about their device, and most will probably mention the scrollwheel. Here’s the story behind the company that makes it (hint: it’s not Apple).
- The Singer IZEK sewing machine uses a Game Boy as an interface. A CD player acts as the centrifuge the LabCD blood testing device relies on. Both realize cost savings from the convergence of smart design sense with off–the–shelf technology. And this unexpected convergence makes for an interesting value proposition to customers. The expected me–too convergence predicted endlessly rarely makes for a design success. Convergence is not a strategy, design driven product innovation is.
- Decades ago Mitsuo Nagamachi developed a way for industrial design to translate the abstractions of the user mental model called Kansei engineering. Recent books like Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things by design guru Donald Norman acknowledge the value of desirability design. An Interview with Virginia Postrel talks about three sources of value: function, meaning, and pleasure. The article, Pricing Beauty: Reflections on Aesthetics and Value, is about communicating the business desirability of aesthetics.
- Sleep deprivation is a serious problem for a large number of Americans, and also for the driving public.
- How broad spectrum light helps the body produce melatonin and how both together can aid sleep. Using a simulated sunrise alarm wakes you up based on human factors.
- The Surprise Ending: It’s not Internet Enabled. The Internet Toaster has, from what I can tell, good usability and clever design. And yet, there is still something missing. Better to spend the ten minutes reconsidering the latest greatest technology.
- What are the assumptions governing a common chair? One company, wanting to foster an innovative, alert state of mind, used an exercise ball as a chair. Most chairs are built on an assumption of fixed position, which is the reason for repetitive stress relief exercises. But humans are built to move, and so chair designs grudgingly allow some limited movement. Few design chairs with the idea humans need to move.
- Applying the timeshare model to cars, Zipcars and Flexcars rethink the car as hourly transportaion service. The basic idea integrates several off–the–shelf technologies into a coherent value proposition to customers comparing well to other alternatives. Add in the environmental benefits and strategic alliances and you get strong design along multiple contexts, boosting the chance of success.
- Suppose a classical automaker goes in some new direction, an air–powered car for instance. There is sure to be some friction with those backing the existing context or conceptual framework of fossil fueled cars. The standard objections from technologists are likely to be it just isn’t possible. The importance of the exercise is not the product, but the human reactions to it and contexts the test reveals. Most information systems are not designed to be tested.
- The Hypercar Revolution project gets the vision right. It advocates for getting past either–or options presented by processing data about the current system, rather than what the system has to be moving forward. What Hypercar reveals is a new class of whole system engineers. The project is not the car (or the product), rather the project develops the company as much as the company develops the product. A continuous stream of activity and product is certain, continuous improvment is not.
