The Alarm Clock That Will Haunt Your Nightmares, if it lets you sleep

In todays article we will be discussing an alarm clock so poorly designed that you are better off just guessing when to wake up rather than using it. This is a version created by LA Crosse Technology and basically is a rectangular black box with a big width, but low height and depth. It has six rectangular buttons on the left side followed by a USB in the bottom left corner.

When you buy this alarm clock it comes preset with not 1, but 2 alarms for midnight, the most inconvenient and unlikely time to actually set an alarm. If you do not immediately turn off these alarms after both putting in batteries and plugging in it in, then it will ring, at mid-night, waking you and the entire family up until you turn the alarm off, after which of course the second alarm will ring after a minute or two has passed. It is almost as if this alarm clock is a joke meant to play with the user’s mind instead of help it get well rested.

The wiry thin rectangular shape also makes it incredibly prone to falling down with the slightest force. Already barely alive when getting out of bed, this alarm makes you be careful when pressing any of the buttons because, when pressed too hard, they will topple the entire clock.

Setting this alarm is also a pain as I usually set my alarm right before going to bed, when it is dark, and, because the buttons do not light up, there is no way to see them in the dark. The buttons are so close together and similar in size, shape, and feel that it difficult to set without light and proper hand-eye coordination, something a college student at 3 in the morning does not have. Once you wake up, instead of being able to just check the time, this alarm clock gives you 6 pieces of information to look at in the display, including the phase of the moon. Now I do not mean to say that the phase of the moon is not important, but I have an alarm clock to quickly glance at it to get the time, not to search through the 6 pieces of information it provides to find the one applicable to me.

Overall this alarm clock might have looked good in theory. It had a sleek design, cool new features, and a USB to charge your phone. In practice, however, this alarm clock was a disaster coming preset to the most annoying alarms, making it hard to set the time in the dark, presenting too much information at once, and most of all failing at just telling the time and instead highlighting how the moon is behaving.

For more examples of bad design visit: https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/10-worst-design-failures-of-all-times/

Thanks for reading,

Anant Agrawal