The difference between the iOS Timer and Alarm screens bugs me.
Shouldn’t Stop appear in the same spot on both screens? Imagine:
Must get up . . . not be late again . . . reach for phone . . . aha, orange button . . . zzz.
It’s poor design, I think, to make Snooze the more visible option. (Perhaps a developer’s joke to give everyone an easy excuse for being late?) Snoozing can be disabled for an alarm, but that might also be a risky choice. So I tinkered with a screenshot to fix things:
How did I finagle the system font (SF Pro) to make a replacement button? All SF fonts are available from Apple as free downloads.
*
As I just discovered, users have been noticing the Stop / Snooze inconsistency since 2017, at least.
[I found myself hitting Snooze not while sleeping but while cooking. I was knocked for a unexpected loop when my alarm sounded a second time.]
Friday, January 7, 2022
Stop / Stop
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
comments: 4
If you remember, the snooze button on a clock radio was always more prominent so you could count how many times you "hit snooze" before you had to get up. Therefore I believe your assertion that the stop button be bigger to be incorrect. Hitting stop accidentally at 7am is worse than snooze while cooking diner.
I’ve never used a clock radio, honest. But my objection is that Stop is in two different spots. Too easy to mix up, I think. With the clock radio, there’s nothing to mix it up with, no?
True. But in the case of your phone app, when in Alarm mode, "Snooze" is the most important button and when in Timer mode, "Stop" is the most important, so I think they got the proportions right. The problem is that you had the wrong mode on and didn't notice. I'd suggest having the modes represented in different colors would be a more appropriate choice, since you'd notice when setting the timer that it was orange instead of the expected blue.
At any rate, I don't use apple products except professionally so I don't know what the app store is like, but can't you just look for an app where the entire screen is "Snooze", and you have to swap to another page to turn it off and every mode is a different color, like I can?
ChasM, I had to laugh — when I have an alarm set (I use a tiny digital clock), Stop is the important button. Snooze is the dangerous one. : )
I tried making another Alarm screen with buttons of equal size, something like this —
Alarm
Snooze
Stop
— but I couldn’t make up my mind about colors. Stop should be red, I’d say. But what should go with Snooze? Green?
Post a Comment