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.

[SteveDallas]

The subject of the thread reminded me instantly of what happened when I bought the book Web Pages That Suck for work. When I showed it to my boss he said, "Are we in it?"

BTW, folks, is this evidence that we need to get together and get Undertoad out of the house a bit? (Like I'm one to talk.)

My big pet peeve about alarm clock interfaces is the lack of a reverse button. It seems like such a simple thing.

As far as the buttons, that's ridiculous. Just like my car--the Ford-provided radio in my 1995 Ford Escort wagon has a completely flat panel. There are no knobs, just flat buttons. Really great for operating by feel while you're driving. (OK, some of them have ridges, but it doesn't really help.)

On the other hand, the radio in my Dodge Grand Caravan has a volume control knob that is electronic rather than mechanical. There is no feedback whatsoever to let you know whether you have the volume turned up almost all the way up, or down, or somewhere in the middle.

[richlevy]

This is funny because your CD-clock radio is the same POS model that I just replaced. In my case the volume switch stopped working. If you didn't put downward pressure on the volume wheel, the volume would decrease to a bare whisper. This made setting the radio or CD as a wakeup chancey.

I just bought a new $20 CD-clock radio. The old unit will be used as a clock in a guest room.

BTW, I bought mine in a regular store (Target, KMart or Best Buy). It's made by Emerson, a maker of , IMO, cheapo electronics.

[Wombat]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

chewing pets

That's what happened to the antenna on mine. Chewed down to 1/8 inch.

[wolf]

I have what I consider one of the best possible alarm clocks. Of course, Sony appears to have discontinued this model ...

It is a combo AM/FM clock radio, with CD player. Stereo speakers. Sony Dream Machine Model ICF-CD830

The controls are easy to remember and manage, even for someone with excrutiatingly bad vision who might be compelled to try to set the clock at night. In the dark.

It can be set to wake by radio, buzzer, or CD. Each of these three choices has an INDEPENDENT time setting. So, you can tell it to turn the CD on at 7:30 AM, the Radio at 8:00 AM, and the harsh obnoxious buzzer at 9:00 AM to let you know you missed whatever was so fucking important to begin with.

One push button allows you to determine which permutations of Radio/CD/Buzzer you wish to have active. You can select one, two, all three, or the blessed silence of none.

The snooze button is cumulative. If you push it once, you get 10 minutes, twice for 20 minutes, and so on.

Either the CD player or the radio can be turned on manually, and the sleep timer works for either.

It does have an external antenna, but I don't have pets, so that's not an issue for me.

Not a bad little toy, considering that I told my mom that I wanted a boom box for Christmas that year.

[Cyber Wolf]

Maybe it's just me, UT, but I have that exact same CD radio and I had no problem at all figuring it out. I can even hit snooze reliably

[zippyt]

it looks like a target to me UT , fuck up hitting the wrong button one to many times and it would be riped from the wall , flung in to the yard , shot to pieces and probley stomped a few times !!!!!!
My wife had to replace HER clock radio just recently .

[FloridaDragon]

UT, that clock would survive being brought home and used ONCE then would be messily destroyed. Our clock has only about 6 buttons on it and I still sometimes hit each one five or six times trying to turn it off early of a morning.

When I saw this thread title I immediately thought of a software program graphical user interface (GUI). We had one guy many years ago that won that award for an old IBM mainframe based gui in which he used every single color, in combination with underlining, reverse video, blinking, bold and italics. It was the most horrendous interface of all times and I wish I had an image of it as an example of what not to do....ever...just walk away from the keyboard...

[cowhead]

looks like a tool of the 'evil one' I LOOOOVE my alarm clock... simple, with big buttons and big numbers that are green... soothing green... a snooze and a NAP button!.. drool drool.. two alarms, a dimmer setting so the dimmer the room the dimmer the time... radio that actually doesn't sound like ass and gets decent reception! this is the third one i've owned... i need to buy a couple more in case they stop making them..

GE model number 7-4853c

look into it! wonderfull machine

[wolf]

I keep wanting to get one of those "Zen Alarm Clocks" ... which are sufficiently un-zen-like in that they do actually ring ... there's a chime that strikes are increasingly short intervals to "gently rouse you from sleep".

They are too damn expensive, though.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Radio Shack programmable power center and timer, switches on a remote module at an outlet by the bed. Plugged into the module is a NFSS Bed Vibrator that shakes the bed and makes a hell of a racket. The vibrator has a warning label to be used for waking up only, NO FUN ALLOWED.
Basically it’s a plastic “box” about 8” by 11” with a pent roof 2” high. There is a small electric motor inside that has an eccentric weight that causes imbalance(vibration) and slaps the inside of the “box”(noise).
This thing goes off everyday at the set time unless I shut it off. I remember forgetting to shut it off once when a friend was staying over for the first time. Had to peel her off the ceiling.