• My Alarm Clock - [My Design Work]

    I did a Multi-function alarm clock interface prototyping on 24-Mar-2008 using Microsoft Visual Basic.

    The design concept and details are listed in below:

    1. The Interface Design Detail:

    Figure 1: The multi-function alarm clock front-view


    1.1.    Design Concept
    1.1.1 Simplicity: Simple is the best. My design is to let the alarm clock to be able to fit into any environment any place in a room. No strange shape is constructed. The color is white and light grey which gives a clean and simple impression.

    1.1.2 No bottons trendy look: The big screen in the front view is a touch screen. All functions can be configured through the touch screen. CD player,Cassette tape player, radio, and alarm clock, if you see them seperately, there is nothing much new. So when we combine them all together, the design of the product need to give user something fresh.Hence, I picked touch screen as the interface.Through this interface, User is playing cd/tape/radio through a non-conventional way

    1.1.3 Hide the CD/Cassette Tape from the side: CD and Cassette tape are to be inserted from the rightside of the box. If you don't take a closer look, you won’t notice that it is a CD and Cassette tape player easily. I believe that a good design is to bring user surprises and to give user something unexpected from details.

    1.1.4 Intelligent: The alarm clock displays information and instructions to user. It detects user incorrect action and gives advice through the touch screen.

    1.1.5 No tag: Everyday our life is taged with all the brands. From the things you wear, the things you use, and even yourself is tagged with a name. Are all the tags good enough to identify an individual from the rest? Are you getting sick of your been tagged life ? Hence, base on this concept, there is no any brand tag been marked on this product.

    2 Interface details:
    2.1 The touch screen interface design:
    There is a touch botton on the touch screen “power”. When it is off, the alarm clock is just a clock. It saves power and it is environment friendly. The screen looks much simplier than all the functions been turned on. figure 2 shows how the screen looks like when “power” is off , and figure 3 shows how it looks like when “power” is on.


     
    Figure 2: The touch screen when cd/tape/radio power are off. The alarm clock is simply a clock.


    Figure 3: When touch on “Power” icon, cd/tape/radio menu appears and then user can choose to play cd/tape/radio

    2.2 Consideration for all levels of users:
    Instructions, warnning, sound track information etc. are displayed on the screen. It helps all levels of user to control the alarm clock through an easy way. Examples are shown in Figure 4.
     

    Figure 4: Consideration for all levels of users.

    The source code and executable file can be downloaded here:

    http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home5/yang0074/MengdiAlarmClockFile.rar