The worst user interface I've ever encountered

[Undertoad]

I was going to document this earlier, but I was married to the person who bought it for me as a gift. You know how it is, giving gifts to geeks. They're insufferable. Nothing is good enough for them. You really should just give them cash.

My dream, at one time, was to have a clock radio that I could set to have a CD wake me up instead of the stupid radio stations. Today, that seems like a simple dream, but these devices were not widely available at the time.

And so she bought this. A Brookstone product, who are normally more reliable, but more about style, not about user interface. First impression: I'm not sure that, at night, I want something right next to my head that looks like either a giant bug or an alien. Second impression: holy crap, they have developed the very worst interface ever, so bad that one wonders whether it was intentional. Let's examine it shall we.




Here, then, is most of the problem. This is most of your user interface. Let me remind you when you would typically use this particular interface. Once at night, in very low light; and in the morning, when you have just woken up and are in a general state of waking confusion. Got that?

The first problem: there are 13 buttons here and they are all nearly identical. You cannot possibly remember the function of 13 buttons, and in a half-awake state, well forget about it. Maybe the buttons are labeled? Sure, but here the labels are grey-on-grey, and tiny!

At night, your goal is to set your alarm time... can you figure out how to do it, just by looking at the button names?

Of course not. To set the alarm time, you press the "alarm" button, and simultaneously press either of the buttons to the lower left of the "snooze" button -- marked "set".

Now, if by accident you press the "clock" button, and simultaneously press either of the "set" buttons instead, you change the actual time. Oh, can you remember which of the 13 buttons is which yet? When you don't remember the meaning of half of them?

The other time you need to use this interface is in the morning, when you either want to shut the alarm off or snooze. Luckily - in the only correct decision made about this design - the SNOOZE button is slightly larger than the other buttons, and so one might remember that and hit it for additional snooze time. Don't hit that "stop" button though, or you'll get an additional snooze time of 24 hours. Sure, that button is slightly larger than other buttons too, but there are four button sizes and you want ONLY the largest one for the 9 minute snooze.




But if you want to shut the alarm off, you have to get to the side of the thing, where there are two more controls. Now, notice how likely you are to lower the volume while switching the alarm from "off" to "auto". ("Auto", by the way, is short for "Alarm set to radio, or CD, depending on how you've set the switch on the other side.")

If you do realize that you've changed the volume, can you remember which way is up and which is down? You have to either turn the thing on and listen to it while adjusting the volume, or actually look at the switches. Which you can't do because it's on a crowded end table and turning the thing around means spilling the glass of water and the books and whatever else everyone who uses clock radios might place next to them.




Now, on the complete other side are these controls, which do not enrage you until you realize that they are mirror-identical to the controls on the other side. Which means that in your nighttime confusion, you may well attempt to switch your alarm to "Auto" and successfully navigate around the volume control... only to find later that you actually set the function control to "CD" and your alarm never went off.




Here, then, the butt-end of it; the least offensive. It does however suffer from the strange matter of having the little FM wire antenna hang off, 3 feet long, into the middle of nowhere. Radios use different approaches to having an FM antenna and it seems to me that having it merely hang off the back of the thing is probably the worst possible choice for a clock-radio, where you might have curious kids or chewing pets etc.