The Real World: Snoozing

Lon Barfield

The most delicate time of day for many people is the early morning: trying to match a pair of socks in the dark winter dawn, sorting out a quick breakfast, battling through the sea of commuters. I saw it all nicely summed up by a phrase printed on a cup; `Don't talk to me until I've had my first cup of coffee'.

At this sensitive time any contact with obstreperous technology should be minimised. However, at this time most people actually need very obstreperous technology to wake them up and get them out of bed, namely the humble alarm clock.

I've just replaced my old one. The plastic hands were so old they were starting to curl, not a problem in itself apart from the fact that they occasionally got caught up with one another as they went around. My new one is a bright acid green (which matches the colour scheme of our bedroom) but all the hands are black making telling the time in the dark mornings as difficult a task as matching socks.

Anyway, the subject I'm trying to get onto is snooze functions. Recently I wrote a piece about protected functions, a protected function has an extra state slipped into the transition from a safe state to a dangerous state. This extra state acts as a buffer state making the dangerous state that extra bit more difficult to reach.

Snooze functions are extra states slipped in-between transitions not to protect anything but to make the transition somewhat softer. With the alarm clock the simple on-to-off transition is softened into an on-to-snooze-state- to-off transition. The snooze state keeps reminding the user that they ought to wake up and get their act together. My new alarm clock, like my old, has no snooze function. It immediately starts beeping and I immediately switch it off, even before I have woken up in the true sense of the word.

If you look around there are other examples of this soft transition between states. The light in cars that is coupled to the car door. It is dark, I open the door to get in and a light goes on. I climb in, shut the door, the light goes off and I struggle to get my seat belt on in the dark. With a so called `courtesy light' the light remains on for a few seconds giving the occupants time to sort themselves out and settle down. I like the idea that the light is being courteous in giving you a few seconds to sort your seat belt out. My choice of terminology would be to call this a `pretty obvious function light' and the first example a `downright rude light'.

Other examples of snooze states fall into the realm of stand-by functions. A sort of `not dead but sleeping' mode where the system is almost off but is attent to a wake up signal from the user. Televisions with remote controls have a state where they are not off but are awaiting an on signal from the remote control.

The stand-by state is a case of the transition from off to on being softened with an eye to saving energy. In a similar way the transition from on to off can also be softened with a stand-by state, although here the transition from on to stand-by is automatically initiated by the system itself.

Consider screen savers whose original purpose was to blank out the screen if the system was left for a length of time. Nowadays this function is also performed on a hardware level by energy saving monitors. Here at General Design we once had a PC that had an energy saving monitor coupled to an energy saving graphics card. The two combined to give a stand-by state that was less of a snooze and more of a semi-coma. No amount of mouse or keyboard activity could wake it from its slumber, the only solution was a system reboot. It saved plenty of energy but was pretty hard on the nerves.

The television and the PC monitor are examples of snooze states for saving energy. The alarm clock and the `courtesy light' are more interesting, they are examples of snooze states with an eye on the user. The complexity of the interaction is actually increased but the result of the extra complexity is a better system, a system more attuned and better matched to the natural complexity of the user. Hmmmmm. Sounds a bit like neural networks doesn't it?

Lon Barfield is the author of `The User Interface, Concepts and Design' (Addison Wesley) and is an associate director of General Design (http://www.design.nl/). He can be contacted at lon@design.nl.

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Vol.30 No.1, January 1998
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