Mike Stone

Mostly The Lonely Howls Of Mike Baying His Ideological Purity At The Moon

Stupid Design Decisions

27 Jan 2025

I want to point out how even small design decisions can impact the lives of others in tangible ways. There are people out there who are making decisions on design that don’t seem to be thinking overly hard about what those decisions are going to mean. I’m going to take a relatively minor example from my own life to showcase this. This event is a tiny thing, and recent. It’s also not the only time something like this has happened.

I woke up late this morning because my alarm failed to go off. I was confused because I distinctly remember setting it last night. I have multiple children that have extracurricular activities this morning at multiple schools, so things need to get going earlier on Mondays than they do on any other day of the week.

When it comes to alarms, I’m pretty lazy about the whole thing and just use my phone as my alarm clock. It’s handy because I charge my phone next to my bed. I shouldn’t have my phone on my nightstand if I want a good night’s sleep, but even when I’m not on call I’m kind of on call so I need to be reachable at all hours of the night, so nightstand it is. Phones adjust with time zones, so if you’re traveling you’re always going to have your alarms available to you and at the time zone appropriate time. Handy.

I checked my phone I found that I didn’t get it plugged all the way in so the battery didn’t charge. I was sitting at 9% and in “Extreme Battery Saver Mode”.

Annoyed, I got it plugged in all the way so I could have SOME power in it when I was dropping various children off at their various activities.

Immediately when I plugged it in, my alarm started going off. I have one of those alarms that starts quiet and increases volume slowly so it doesn’t just scare the crap out of you first thing in the morning to get you out of bed, but immediately upon plugging the phone in, the alarm was at full volume. This tells me that my alarm was going off, but wasn’t producing any sound.

Why wasn’t the phone producing sound? Well, because when you’re in Extreme Battery Saver mode, it doesn’t do sounds. So, someone somewhere made the decision that if your phone battery is low, you don’t want your alarm to go off? That’s not good. That’s really not good. An alarm is an alarm. It’s there for a reason, and it’s probably something you want to go off regardless of the state of your battery.

So, because of this design decision, my children were all late for their various activities this morning. Not by huge amounts, but late is late. I’m annoyed. My wife is annoyed. Everybody’s day started off frantic, and that’s not how I like to start my week. I don’t think my kids do either.

I realize that when it all comes down to it, this was my fault. I should have double checked to make sure my phone was charging when I plugged it in. A simple check would have made everyone’s morning a lot less annoying. I didn’t do that and so everyone was late. Despite that, I think my point stands. This was a stupid design decision and I hope it gets fixed. I’ll be sure to double check my charging status, at least for the next few nights until I forget all about it. I’m sure that means this will happen again in the future, and I’ll be kicking myself for letting it happen again.

I’m just in a foul mood this morning. Might have something to do with how I woke up.

Day 36 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.



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