iOS 26 Alarm Buttons
iOS 26 alarms 🐘 vs iOS 18 🤏
Previously, the Snooze button was much larger than Stop, and they were separated. I think both of these points helped prevent accidentally turning off an alarm that you only meant to snooze.
Jack Fields (via Trung Phan):
At Apple, we found that when both buttons are the same size, people were 30% more likely to oversleep. During testing, we had a version of Clock that logged all touch gestures into a heat map. It was recording where our sleepy hands were smacking around on the screen in order to see how accurate we were in turning off the alarms. It turns out we are pretty shit at it. Snoozing an alarm means you get another chance to try waking up again in a few minutes so it’s low risk. By making the button the stop button such a small hit target, it ensures you’re awake enough to actually stop it.
This new design is…interesting. It goes against any studies I was a part of so I’m curious what data they have to support the change. It’s terrifyingly large now.
This seems like the phone call buttons to me, where the previous design was clearly better.
I’m less interested in the UI of buttons and much more interested in the fact that, 10+ years after Apple Watch was first released, it’s still utterly shit at handling time zones.
We have three types of object, Alarms [with Sleep alarm as a special case], Reminders, and Calendar events. They all behave differently when you change time zones, and every one of them gets something wrong.
Not to mention that since some watch update a few months ago, the time shown in an alarm complication is wrong. If you switch off the sleep alarm after sleep time has kicked in, the complication does not update the displayed time.
Previously:
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Everything I see just further convinces me that there are no actual designers in charge at Apple.
Design isn't just how something looks, it's how it works. Or so I've been told.
Every single thing that has shipped the last many years has been a regression, or at best a reversion from the regression back to what worked.
I don't want to keep calling that guy out by name, but I don't know who else to hold responsible. He's in charge of all UI/UX.
