I received an iLive Projection Clock Radio with Dock for iPod as a Christmas gift to go along with my new iPod Touch. I love the iPod Touch; I really like the idea of the clock radio and it was an extremely nice and generous gift. However, unfortunately I really dislike the actual clock radio, and it's all because of usability.
What I wanted
Since the version of the iPod Touch that my wife purchased didn't have an external speaker, I wanted something that I could dock the iPod into at night that would charge it and whenever the alarm would go off, play music from the iPod. Period. End of story. All I needed.
What I like
The clock radio has a lot of great features, like dual alarms, a sleep timer, several different modes for the alarm (wake to iPod, buzzer, nature sounds, etc), and good sound quality. It's large enough that you won't knock it off your nightstand on accident but small enough that it doesn't take up the entire surface area. It's sleek and looks nice.
What I really don't like
Unfortunately, iLive apparently did not appear to put much research into usability and especially not user testing for this product. Now before I go any further, let me preface this by saying I'm using this as my primary alarm clock to wake up for work in the morning, not just to listen to the iPod--the latter function works just fine.
The Command Buttons
All of the command buttons are the exact same size, shape, and location with even spacing between each--12 of them, to be exact, 2 rows of 6. Even the volume control is two circular buttons mixed in with the rest. The power button is not even a corner button or the exact middle--it's towards the top left but over one. But don't worry, they put a small indentation on it so your finger can find it as you grope blindly across the whole control panel trying to figure out how to turn off the alarm (that is, when the alarm actually goes off like it's set to).
The Snooze Button
The one exception on the ambiguous buttons is the extremely thin snooze button located just off the top front edge. Unfortunately, it's set at a bit of an angle and you can't just press slightly straight down on the top of your clock radio to snooze--you have to put some pressure behind it and almost curl your fingers around the edge and pull back towards you to get the snooze button to catch.
The Display
The main display is bright blue backlight with dark grey (I won't call it black because it's not a deep enough hue to call it that). It has three adjustments for the intensity of the display, all of which are still too bright and light up the whole room while you're sleeping. And because the blue backlight is so intense, when you look at the clock in the middle of the night all you see is this bright blue rectangle and can't read the actual clock numbers.
The Clock Projector
It has a really nice feature where it will project the clock onto another surface in addition to the normal display. It will swivel 90 degrees and has a wheel toggle to adjust the clarity. However, because the alarm could be situated in various positions they gave the projector the ability to reverse the numbers and at least mine by default was reversed from what I would think the normal setting would be.
You'd think with 12 command buttons there would be an easy way to toggle the projector to reverse the display, either in a separate button all on its own or through a settings menu somewhere, but there isn't. Someone on the Internet wrote a product review and happened to mention that they figured out how to do it: while the unit is in standby mode, hold down the snooze button to reverse the projector display. The best part is I had to look on the Internet to figure out how to do it because the instruction manual doesn't mention that anywhere in the entire document, only that the display can be reversed.
The Alarm
The clock radio has a dual alarm, which is nice but I wouldn't ever use the second alarm, personally. But to set an alarm you toggle 1 of the 12 command buttons over and over to go from turning it on to setting the hour to setting the minute to flip through each of the various wake options (iPod, buzzer, nature sounds, etc). If you have to have 12 command buttons then why would you have to toggle between all of these alarm options using only 1 of the 12?
When the alarm actually goes off (mine actually worked for a few days before it suddenly started not making any sound when the alarm went off regardless of any settings you changed but it still played music out of the speakers independent from the alarm just fine) you have to find the little power button in the middle of the 12 command buttons to turn it off.
If you hit the snooze button but get up before the alarm goes off the second time, good luck. Apparently you have to do something with the power button but not a typical operation--my wife was able to do it once but I never could get the result I wanted, because while you are "snoozing" the unit is already in standby and therefore powered "off", so pressing it would just turn the whole thing on and start playing your iPod independently from the alarm when you were trying to turn it off so you didn't wake up your sleeping spouse. My first instinct was to press the alarm button to cancel the snooze but to do it that way you have to go through all 7 or 8 clicks of the button to reset the alarm entirely and then it wouldn't be set for the next morning so the night before you'd have to go through the settings again. I also tried hitting the snooze button again thinking it might cancel the snooze but to no avail.
What I did to solve it
I spent two days looking at product reviews online for various combinations of alarm clocks and simple speaker stands and dock chargers and whatnot and finally realized that the functionality that I originally wanted--to be able to charge my iPod at night and to be able to play music or a chime or something as an alarm, was still functional with the setup that I already had. I just had to ignore almost every feature that it came with, tape a piece of black paper over the blindingly bright display, and use the build-in alarm that came with the iPod.
Now when I go to bed I just set my iPod in the dock on the top of the clock radio and turn on the "night stand" application so the screen stays on throughout the night and just has a black background and a light yet unobtrusive green display of the current time (which is a really cool iPod application--I highly recommend it if you don't already have it). The built-in alarm of the iPod has an easy setting to choose which days of the week you want the alarm to be on for. And when it does go off, I just press either "Snooze" or "Off" on the display. So simple! Why in the world was it so complicated for my iLive clock radio to perform the same functionality?!?!
What my point is
Usability can be seen everywhere; unfortunately it is most prominently noticeable when it is implemented poorly. Regardless of what you're creating, whether it's an alarm clock or a web site or an application, if you don't put effort into making sure it is as usable and intuitive as you can make it, you will not only have a product that people don't enjoy but it can actually stress them out and really irritate them. I woke up late for work on several occasions and had to scramble to get ready because I didn't know how to use my alarm clock. Because I couldn't clearly tell how to use it, I couldn't tell if it was defective. I just kept thinking it was user error because the interface was so complicated and unintuitive. It's easy to blame the user for not understanding, and we as users of products often blame ourselves unnecessarily. But in reality if a product isn't intuitive it is the fault of the designer; no amount of documentation or explanation can shift the blame.
Not only can poor user experience design irritate and stress out your users but typically if the user isn't required to use your product by some governing force in their life (employees at work, kids at school, etc) most likely people won't take the time to figure out how to use it--they will simply return it to the store or surf on to the next site or whatever. In my example, I was stuck with the product because it was a gift and I had already thrown the box away with all the other boxes we had lying around after Christmas from the kids' toys and other gifts that my wife and I received. Since I couldn't find a replacement that I felt was justifiable for the added expense, instead I simply bypassed 90% of the functionality.
How you can avoid this
User stories can be a huge factor in these sort of things. Come up with various fictitious people who fit profiles of various users that might come in contact with your product and define what actions they would likely want to take, and then continually and actively pursue making certain that those actions are as easy as possible to perform for those core users likely to utilize your product. I believe Alan Cooper was the original UI evangelist that came up with this approach but you can find information about it all over the web.
Do your research. By reading this post you're learning more about usability and what pitfalls you can encounter and hopefully how you can try to avoid some of them. There is a wealth of knowledge published by people much smarter than me all about usability and creating a great user experience--just look for it.
Always, always, always run your user interface ideas and prototypes by someone else, preferably someone not intimately involved in the project. This helps prevent "tunnel vision".
Follow standards/guidelines and be consistent. If you work at a company and have a UX committee (like mine does, of which I just happen to be the chairman so here's my shameless plug), involve them early and often to get ideas and make sure you follow your company's guidelines for consistency and good usability. If your company doesn't have a UX committee, start one.
Have someone (preferable several people) try using it before you finalize the product--ideally you would have people test early on and throughout the process. You need to know what a common user would likely experience with it, not someone who knows the inner workings of the system. You will be surprised with what people think you should be able to do or what something would do if they clicked on it, etc.
Illicit and pay attention to customer feedback. What seemed like a good idea at first might turn out to not be as good as you originally thought. So what? Fix it, improve it, and learn from it.
