The tumble clock: bringing users in touch with their snooze time

Although seemingly simple and easy to design for, the moment of waking up and deciding on how long to snooze poses interesting design challenges. While traditional alarm clock interfaces feature large buttons or dropdown menus to communicate (fixed) snooze time, embodied interaction with the entire alarm clock can help to express how much snooze time is desired in a more nuanced way. This paper presents the design of Tumble Clock, a buttonless "balance-object" that exposes its entire surface as interaction area, allowing for snoozing its alarm simply by tilting and releasing or pushing the entire artefact. The Tumble Clock's interaction possibilities and the appreciation of this tangible approach to interaction with time have been evaluated in a user study. Our study indicates that, when enriched with feedback on action, the Tumble Clock's balance behavior can successfully facilitate in tangibly communicating variable intangible information such as snooze time.