How google made it easier to snooze our alarms— UX insights

I woke up to my alarm today and noticed this:

The size of the button to snooze or stop the alarm is massive!
I hadn’t seen a buttons this big before, which made me wonder, Why?

Perhaps this is the case:

When everyone tries to wake up, it does make sense for one to be able to comfortably snooze in all the dizziness of waking up.

Which means the people who designed it understood the state of the users and their capabilities.

Is making it comfortable for the user to snooze their alarms overall a good thing? Well, that is debatable

but there is something larger at play here that we can notice. Which is how Google is enlarging parts of their UI.

Main search in google app

When we look at the “main search” in the Google app, it has been enlarged, and this is a welcome change because that is the primary action every user taps on, and it makes sense to enlarge it.

Similarly, when it comes to adjusting brightness, the UI has been made quite easy to access as well.

Large icons used in Google maps UI

The first time most people would have noticed these large UI changes is on the Google Maps app while driving, and this makes sense because a user will be far from their phones while driving, and they need larger icons to help them access it easily.

There seem to be two reasons to use this enlarged UI across products:

1. When the user is further away from the screen: Similar to the alarm and map example, while performing an action, if the user finds themselves further away from the device, it is ideal to have larger icons to help them operate comfortably from a distance.
2. When the feature is used frequently by users, In cases like Google search and brightness, where we know that users will be performing one particular action the most on one screen it makes sense to enlarge this action to make it easier to operate.

With these lessons, we can apply them to other products, An example can be for

Image of a delivery driver

An app that delivery drivers use to navigate to the right location can have a larger UI as the driver will mostly be having their phone further away from them

Are there any other Google products that you have noticed using this trend? there are a few I can think of in the desktop space, but if there are more

share it in the comments and that is all for now :)

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