That's one of the things I liked about the Android alarm app that I miss on my iPhone; when you set an alarm and tap "Done", it would say "Alarm set for 9 hours and 22 minutes from now" (or whatever), a quick sanity check to make sure you didn't confuse A.M. and P.M. or accidentally put in the wrong day.
And a fun fact: it even calculates it correctly across a daylight savings time change. I noticed that when the clocks went back; instead of just subtracting the times, my Android phone accounted for the change and added the hour that I was getting back. Awesome!
Yes, I love this little detail. The posted Siri example could use the same thing - since I don't always know the date, it would be nice to see it as a relative time (i.e. Did you mean: 8.5 hours from now, or 1 day 8.5 hours?).
This thing is indeed a lifesaver, not just because of time of day but because alarms could be previously set to only go off on certain days. So when I'm told the alarm won't go off for 80 hours or something, I can correct it immediately.
As a bonus, it gives a good estimate on how much sleep I'm going to get.
In iOS the alarms are sorted chronologically, so if you have more than one alarm set up, it's pretty easy to notice if you accidentally did PM because your alarm ends up at the bottom of the list instead of the top.
Not that I'm saying this is better than what you're describing. I'm just saying this in case any iOS users didn't realize that and it's helpful.
One of the many benefits of using a 24-hour clock (which is the default on the iOS alarm app in my country). Not that I'm disagreeing with you; I think that's a great solution on Android's part.
Indeed, just to give some props to Nokia, my (now retired) Nokia N8 running its latest Symbian OS does the same thing for its alarm functionality and tells you the time duration before ringing.
It also displays the time of the next alarm on the lock screen. This is a really nice sanity check: A quick glance at the screen when going to bed ensures that it will wake me up at the right time the next morning.
One of my favorite features! Before I had an Android phone I can't tell you how many times I bone-headedly picked PM instead of AM. Even with this feature I catch myself getting it backwards sometimes, but I get to correct it right then instead of when it's too late.
It's all about the little big details that reduce friction in user experience. This attention to detail:
1) reduces errors and user frustration,
2) substantiates the thought in the user's mind that "the software will do what I want", and
3) teaches users that the software will accomodate them, instead of requiring the user to accomodate the software.
It would have been better, actually, if the dates also mentioned the day of week, like "Thursday, October 21 / Friday, October 22". I'm more familiar with what the day of week it is, but not necessarily what the date is.
If it mentioned the weekday, I would be able to answer "Thursday" immediately, since I know that I intended it for Thursday, but I wouldn't necessarily know that it was the 21st without looking at my watch.
This is what causes my love-hate relationship with Siri: when it works, it's a fantastic experience and gets little details like this spot-on; when it doesn't, it's off by a mile. More frustratingly, it doesn't seem to improve much between major iOS releases despite being mostly a thin client to Apple's services.
To be fair, I generally prefer obvious failure rather than quietly doing the wrong thing (which is what probably would have happened here), but even really simple stuff like "take me home" only seems to work as expected half the time.
(I'm ignoring situations where the voice recognition fails outright, since that's a totally different problem - this just relates to handling of correctly-interpreted commands)
Like many others, I wonder what Apple's QA and user feedback processes look like with Siri. Unlike Maps, there's no way (AFAIK) to report a crappy Siri response, so while I'm sure they have stats on low-confidence speech-to-text results, I'm not sure what they do to determine "you heard me right, but you did the wrong thing" or "doing X instead of Y would have been a lot more useful". As such I assume most of it is internal QA process, and Apple's secrecy around new features (fortunately Siri no longer qualifies as such) definitely hurts QA that requires a lot of real-world usage.
My only complaint with this is that I often have no idea what day it is. I'd love it if it added the day of the week as well. "It's after midnight, did you mean today, Tuesday, or yesterday, Monday the Xth day."
I too have seen this a handful of times and thought, "Wow, that's really clever Siri!" only to realize a few seconds later that Oct 21st vs Oct 20th does not help me and I am still screwed. Then I cancel out and go look at the calendar day and then re-sirify it.
I wonder what the workflow is in the Apple teams that allows them to catch stuff like this. Is this the work of a single, smart programmer, or a good QA team?
It's most likely from a strong culture of interaction design and usability testing. During the design process, you usually do usability tests with would-be users and they can help illuminate issues with your design. In this case, it may have even been during testing that a person said, "well that's not what I meant by tomorrow."
Pretty much every time I do a usability test or study, random users catch small things like this that help make a product much better. When you design without feedback, you have your own mental model of how everything is supposed to work. But you're the designer and the expert, and users are not. They often find different ways to use your product than you intended.
Boy I can't wait for the day when we look at this screenshot and chuckle that it was even needed. My problem with Siri and others is that if I have to look at the screen after every command, it kills away a huge chunk of the benefit. If Siri was a human, it is the equivalent of having the human repeat what he heard every time you made a request to confirm he understood you correctly. That would be annoying. And often just easier to do it yourself.
This is one area there is massive room for innovation. I'd give it a few years before we can say a command like "hey iphone, text mom that I am home" and within seconds, hear back "done!". I'd know with confidence that the right message was sent. Even more importantly, I'd be able to do all this without needing to lift my phone, or have to get closer to the phone or speak too much louder than whispering the request to an assistant.
Maybe this was apparent to everyone using Siri, but today I asked it/her "Who is my girlfriend?"
it replied what is your girlfriends name?
I told it
It then set the alias "Girlfriend" to her and now I can say
"Siri send a message to my girlfriend saying I love you"
which I think is totally awesome. Im late to the Siri party though...
I just want to point out that this must be a recent innovation, because only two weeks ago I got screwed over by telling Siri to create an appointment "tomorrow" after 12am, and she booked it for the day after and told me she created the appointment for "tomorrow" (no date).
One time I had to set my alarm for 4am (early flight) and Siri said, "OK, but don't wake me up!". On the one hand that's pretty funny of course, but on the other hand, I think it's a helpful sanity check for you to make sure you didn't actually mean 4pm.
My girlfriend insists that, as soon as the clock ticks over to 12:00AM, "tomorrow" means a full 24 hours later. I still insist "tomorrow" doesn't change up until you sleep (or stay up all night).
I had a miscommunication with an old boss once. He had sent me an email asking me to do a few tasks. He had written "do x or y and z" His intent in the email was for me to do either task x or task y, and regardless then do z. However the way he had written it I had parsed it as
In Japan (where they use a 24 hour clock), opening hours for stores/restaurants, or broadcast times for TV shows will often be written as something like "27:00", which would mean 3 AM (24+3).
Although I've also seen a "Track 0" at a train station.
Math in spotlight on os x showed me that there is someone in the company who pays attention to how a user uses the system. Not just the math part, but the fact that you can copy the result to the pasteboard with the keyboard shortcut
When I first saw the Siri Query, I was anticipating it would try to disambiguate A) remind me (to inflate my tires tomorrow) (at 9:00) vs. B) remind me (to inflate...) (tomorrow at 9:00). I guess I was overthinking it.
This seems common sense to me, I would most likely have done it this way if I were designing a voice operated alarm module. Hence it follows Apple is already likely to have a patent on it.
I wouldn't call it great design. I'd call it lack of bad design. I feel like asking which day you're referring to is an extremely obvious step in selecting a time. The fact that we're surprised by it is a testament to how terrible most productivity software is.
[+] [-] minikites|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedc|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsankey|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jere|13 years ago|reply
As a bonus, it gives a good estimate on how much sleep I'm going to get.
[+] [-] eridius|13 years ago|reply
Not that I'm saying this is better than what you're describing. I'm just saying this in case any iOS users didn't realize that and it's helpful.
[+] [-] Osmium|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindblink|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymouz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iyulaev|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haberman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rohitarondekar|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markbao|13 years ago|reply
1) reduces errors and user frustration,
2) substantiates the thought in the user's mind that "the software will do what I want", and
3) teaches users that the software will accomodate them, instead of requiring the user to accomodate the software.
It would have been better, actually, if the dates also mentioned the day of week, like "Thursday, October 21 / Friday, October 22". I'm more familiar with what the day of week it is, but not necessarily what the date is.
If it mentioned the weekday, I would be able to answer "Thursday" immediately, since I know that I intended it for Thursday, but I wouldn't necessarily know that it was the 21st without looking at my watch.
[+] [-] __del__|13 years ago|reply
If I'm talking to robots after midnight, I don't know the date. This has been proven by scientists.
[+] [-] sneak|13 years ago|reply
> without looking at my watch
> watch
ಠ_ಠ
[+] [-] hayksaakian|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Firehed|13 years ago|reply
To be fair, I generally prefer obvious failure rather than quietly doing the wrong thing (which is what probably would have happened here), but even really simple stuff like "take me home" only seems to work as expected half the time.
(I'm ignoring situations where the voice recognition fails outright, since that's a totally different problem - this just relates to handling of correctly-interpreted commands)
Like many others, I wonder what Apple's QA and user feedback processes look like with Siri. Unlike Maps, there's no way (AFAIK) to report a crappy Siri response, so while I'm sure they have stats on low-confidence speech-to-text results, I'm not sure what they do to determine "you heard me right, but you did the wrong thing" or "doing X instead of Y would have been a lot more useful". As such I assume most of it is internal QA process, and Apple's secrecy around new features (fortunately Siri no longer qualifies as such) definitely hurts QA that requires a lot of real-world usage.
[+] [-] esolyt|13 years ago|reply
4 hours from now
28 hours from now
This one doesn't require me to know the current date and also works as a sanity check to make sure I'm not confusing AM and PM.
[+] [-] chucknelson|13 years ago|reply
"Why are you asking me about number of hours, Siri?! I just said tomorrow, damnit!".
[+] [-] whalesalad|13 years ago|reply
I too have seen this a handful of times and thought, "Wow, that's really clever Siri!" only to realize a few seconds later that Oct 21st vs Oct 20th does not help me and I am still screwed. Then I cancel out and go look at the calendar day and then re-sirify it.
Then again I am not that smart.
[+] [-] runemadsen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwthornton|13 years ago|reply
Pretty much every time I do a usability test or study, random users catch small things like this that help make a product much better. When you design without feedback, you have your own mental model of how everything is supposed to work. But you're the designer and the expert, and users are not. They often find different ways to use your product than you intended.
[+] [-] jonknee|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrScruff|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atlbeer|13 years ago|reply
One of those delicate edge cases that you find once you start using a product.
[+] [-] mrxd|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pws5068|13 years ago|reply
Did you mean Sunday October 21st, or October 22nd?
[+] [-] zaidf|13 years ago|reply
This is one area there is massive room for innovation. I'd give it a few years before we can say a command like "hey iphone, text mom that I am home" and within seconds, hear back "done!". I'd know with confidence that the right message was sent. Even more importantly, I'd be able to do all this without needing to lift my phone, or have to get closer to the phone or speak too much louder than whispering the request to an assistant.
[+] [-] sturmeh|13 years ago|reply
This screen would make me feel uneasy and over-analyse the options. (Does it mean yesterday or today? today or tomorrow?)
It would be nice if it also showed the day of the week on each option.
[+] [-] acangiano|13 years ago|reply
In that thread, I commented:
In my opinion a much better question would be "Do you mean in 9 hours?". If you say yes, set it for today. If you say no, then it's tomorrow.
[+] [-] sturmeh|13 years ago|reply
"Alarm set for 9 hours, is this correct?"
Is less intimidating for the user, this way they aren't being asked to calculate something, rather being asked to confirm a calculation.
The difference is trivial and subtle.
[+] [-] keltex|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Off|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OriginalSyn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbrock|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] S_A_P|13 years ago|reply
which I think is totally awesome. Im late to the Siri party though...
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epaga|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cecilpl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eridius|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swalsh|13 years ago|reply
if(x){ taskX(); else { taskY(); taskZ(); }
He was pretty angry when I had only done task x.
[+] [-] kalleboo|13 years ago|reply
Although I've also seen a "Track 0" at a train station.
[+] [-] emehrkay|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daladd|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] altrego99|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aviswanathan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corwinstephen|13 years ago|reply