rolling times

Project Overview

This project is created during the Tangible Design class in the first year of EKA. The aim was to make the world by redesigning a bad screen-based experience and we chose the setting an alarm experience to reinterpret.
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‍Course name: Tangible Design
‍Timeline: 4 weeks
‍Team: Derin Baykal, Karri Kaljend and Fridolin Richter
‍Mentors: Ottavio Cambieri, Anna Jõgi

My Contributions

I took role in brainstorming and idea generation phase. Once my team decided on going with an idea I contributed to the development of the model by doing mock ups. During the prototyping phase, I did the hands-on part which is soldering, knitting the wires and assembling of the parts.

problem

Phones are in every moment of our daily usage. It is a fact that we check our phones all day while watching tv, eating and naturally before going to sleep too. We set the alarms for the next day, or even we have preset them, we want to check it to be sure before sleeping in. However, those checkings lead to other kinds of checking other apps such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, e-mails, etc. We scroll through social media in the dark and strain our eyes to look at the screen until we fall asleep.
Besides, at the moment of setting the alarm, on the layout of apple, you need to type on the keyboard to set time. There are some problems, mainly regarding consistency. If you tap the hours, you can change only the hours, and if you tap the minutes, you can type in the whole thing, including hours. Editing resets the set time, essentially the new alarm. It requires starting over.

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“I really miss the rolling number UI, and especially the haptic feedback. It was so satisfying!”

ideation

There are also some other downsides of setting the alarm by phone in terms of health before sleeping. First, looking at the screen where you see all of the alarms as lit causes anxiety and stress. Second, although your phone has a blue screen filter, looking at bright-lit night can affect your sleep quality.

Therefore, as a team, we decided on turning the bad experience of setting the alarm on the phone into a more intuitive and tactile experience by designing it as tangible. Our proposal was:

Why wouldn’t we turn the alarm experience into something that unwinds the users, let them take their time and relieve their stress by having a tactile experience?

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Then, our HMW became:

“HMW turn the alarm setting experience into something that unwinds the user, lets them have a playful moment and reduces information noise by having a tangible experience, away from the screen?”

This is some text inside of a div block.

We modelled every layer in 3d modelling programmes, and having a preview of each component helped us a lot to detect the faulties.

final product

How it works?

In the final product, we preferred to use blue to show the current time, and green is the time that the user is going to set.
The plate where the user places the ball to set the alarm is divided into four rows in parallel. Along the bottom line, there are numbers from 0 to 12 to show the hours.

Users can only set the alarm for quarters and on the strokes of hours. By giving this restriction, we didn’t only consider minimizing the design but also create an unstressful, unwinding experience before going to sleep.
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Testing out the prototype

Phones are in every moment of our daily usage. It is a fact that we check our phones all day while watching tv, eating and naturally before going to sleep too. We set the alarms for the next day, or even we have preset them, we want to check it to be sure before sleeping in. However, those checkings lead to other kinds of checking other apps such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, e-mails, etc. We scroll through social media in the dark and strain our eyes to look at the screen until we fall asleep.
Besides, at the moment of setting the alarm, on the layout of apple, you need to type on the keyboard to set time. There are some problems, mainly regarding consistency. If you tap the hours, you can change only the hours, and if you tap the minutes, you can type in the whole thing, including hours. Editing resets the set time, essentially the new alarm. It requires starting over.

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“I’m tired at the end of the day. The last thing you do is setting the alarm. It shouldn’t be a burden. I think this is nice because it is so simple, very straightforward.”

“Blind people can also use the design — they could just roll the ball! Also, when I was a child, it was difficult for me to understand how the clock works; this might be a pretty playful way of teaching!”

“It’s pretty fun and playful. When do you want to wake up? Just roll the ball and find out!”

Click here to read more about the project!