This is a quick post to try and highlight how seemingly unimportant UX changes can have significant impact on your end users. Sometimes to their detriment.

My whole life I’ve been a person who is generally late. I would go to bed late, wake up late, get to class late, etc. This is my fundamental nature.

As a responsible adult I quickly realized our household runs much better on a very regimented schedule. My part in making this run smoothly is being in charge of the waking of the family during week days. While this is certainly not my forte, I decided early on that waking the kiddos was my responsibility, not my wife’s.

I’ve come to rely strongly on my Apple Watch over the last 2+ years as my key dependency in this routine. It works as follows -

• 5:50 am — first alarm goes off. Hit snooze.
• 5:59 am — alarm goes off again. Hit snooze. Warn wife we will be getting up in a few minutes
• 6:08 am — alarm goes off. Day starts

Yesterday however our routine came crashing down. It was something along the lines of — 6:25 am look at watch through blurry eyes, have panic set in, scramble to get day going.

This threw off the entire family’s schedule, at least helping lead to one of the poorest morning launches for our family in the last year. I spent significant time apoligizing to my wife for messing up the alarm. I clearly must have hit cancel and not snooze, although I thought I was relatively well trained on this. We agreed to set a 6:15 “emergency” alarm to avoid future derailment of our mornings.

This morning my daughter crawled into bed at ~6am, and I realized that I hadn’t had my 1st snooze go off. Half asleep I programmed an alarm for 6:09 so that we would be sure to get up in time. When I awoke to that alarm, since I was fairly awake this is what I saw (ignore the time on the screen shot)-

Now for context that is the WatchOS 4 screen shot of an alarm going off. This is a screen shot of the same exact interface in WatchOS 3 —

For those who can’t spot the difference, not only was the Snooze button relocated from the left hand side of the screen to the right, the color indicators were also changed so that the more colorful button is still on the left, just with the completely opposite functionality.

I honestly cannot believe I’m the only person that has been bit by this change. I also have difficulty understanding what designer decided that these 2 changes were warranted. It seems like a complete disconnect with anyone who relies on this for the primary use case — waking up.

I clearly won’t be getting rid of my Apple Watch over this minor change. I just wanted to highlight how lack of attention to detail and continuity can greatly impact the users of your tools. Now that I understand the change, I can adjust. But if it were not for my daughter’s accidental intervention, I might have abandoned using it to start my day.