CSCI1300 Critique 3— iPhone Alarms

In the last few years, I’ve started exclusively using my iPhone as my morning alarm. It’s convenient for setting a different wake-up time on different days of the week, and it’s nice to be able to change the name of the alarm to remind myself to do something in the morning. However, I’ve had some problems with Apple’s alarms, especially regarding my ringer and Do Not Disturb settings.

This is a screenshot of the alarms page within the Clock app. The current Alarms system on iPhone is really great for setting different alarms for different days, and for naming alarms to remind me to do something in the morning.

Generally, when I turn my ringer off, my alarms will still go off. However, there have been times when my ringer has been off and my alarm doesn’t sound, which is incredibly confusing. This is irritating for setting morning alarms; I want to turn my ringer off so that I am not awoken by notifications during the night, but I then worry that my alarms will be silenced and I’ll oversleep. There doesn’t appear to be a way to toggle whether alarms will sound when the ringer is switched off.

This is a screenshot of the Sounds menu, under which ringer settings can be adjusted. However, there is no setting to adjust whether alarms sound or are silenced when the ringer is off.

Apple tried to create a solution to this problem with the Do Not Disturb feature. Do Not Disturb silences all calls and alerts, but it doesn’t specify anything about alarms. If I turn on Do Not Disturb at night to silence all notifications, I still worry that my alarm won’t go off in the morning. I’ve had instances of both my alarm sounding and not sounding when Do Not Disturb is enabled, which leads me to the exact same problem I have with the ringer.

This is the settings menu for Do Not Disturb. There is no setting specifically for allowing or disallowing alarms to sound while Do Not Disturb is enabled.

I’m not sure why Apple chose to design it this way. As far as I can tell, I think their intentions were for alarms to still sound even when in silent (ringer off) or Do Not Disturb mode, but this isn’t made clear to the users at all. On top of this, this design seems faulty, as I’ve had multiple instances where my alarm doesn’t go off when ringer is off or Do Not Disturb is on.

Furthermore, there may be times when a user wants their phone to be absolutely silent. Even if they switch their ringer off and turn on Do Not Disturb, if they’ve accidentally left an alarm on, that alarm will still go off. There’s no way to disable the alarm sounding when the phone is in silent or Do Not Disturb mode.

Perhaps Apple designed it this way for the sake of simplicity. After all, the Settings app is already convoluted enough, and adding more switches for toggling alarms would likely confuse more users than it would help. On top of this, they likely realized that their users might be forgetful and leave ringer off or Do Not Disturb on at night, and they wanted to ensure that their morning alarms would still go off. Given this, it appears that Apple chose to sacrifice customizability and efficiency for experienced users for the sake of simplicity and learnability for inexperienced users.

This is my proposed design for the Alarms submenu under settings. It has switches to toggle whether alarms sound when the ringer is silent or when Do Not Disturb is enabled.

I think the best solution to this problem would be to have an additional alarms menu in Settings. Here, the user could toggle certain settings to tailor them to their needs. It would have a switch for allowing alarms when the phone is on silent, which would let users decide whether alarms should sound when the ringer is off, as well as a switch for allowing alarms when Do Not Disturb is enabled. I think it would be more practical to create a separate submenu for alarms rather than putting these switches under Sounds and Do Not Disturb, respectively. By doing so, all alarm settings can be adjusted in one distinct location, which is more learnable and memorable for users.