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:
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.
As Bart says, every design change in recent years seemed to be a regression. I absolutely agree with that.
I work closely with a few really good designers and previously Apples UI/UX designs were praised and used as inspiration. In the last years the tone completely changed and now Apples UI/UX is used as bad examples. Used as a warning: let's not do this, let's avoid that, etc.
Being shortsighted, the bigger buttons are great but a bigger spacing would be helpful. Always found the iOS 18 design way too small to reliably hit half asleep.
@Dave Beta 1 from a trillion dollar company that is not forced by law to release updates to its products every year.
These buttons should be horizontally oriented just like when the phone rings. Give it a distinct look so it’s clear that it’s an alarm not an incoming call. The Snooze button, like the one to accept calls, on the right for right-handed people. Give us a global setting to flip such interface layouts if we are lefties or simply prefer it that way.
In the meantime I keep doing what I’m accustomed to do: snooze by pressing any of the physical buttons and stop the alarm using Siri.
The buttons are used completely different than regular buttons. When you sleep and the phone lies on the nightstand you just want to snooze the alarm. Not picking up the phone like usual but juts hit the button. On old school alarms the snooze button is a big surface to hit half asleep. Same applies no for the iPhone. Treating it like the phone interface would be completely opposite of how alarms are used.
My Huawei phone has a giant button to snooze and a slider element (think "slide to unlock") to stop the alarm. Start your photocopier, Cupertino. The Chinese are beating your asses when it comes to usability.
I have long since stopped snoozing my iphone. I simply set three alarms every morning, spaced 10 minutes apart, and stop them. No snoozing. Avoids the risk and simplifies matters. The iphone has regressed for a very_long_time. Peak iphone was somewhere around the transition from 4S to 5S or thereabout. Some hardware aspects are for sure nicer now but software wise it's just frustrating to try to get it useable in that quiet, intuitive way that it used to be.
As every Sleep Cycle user knows, snoozing should not be done via the touch screen, but via hitting in the direction of the matras or bedside cabinet (whatever you put your telephone at night).
Don't you guys do usability research? ;-)
