3/13/2023 0 Comments Marketing 5 minute timer flipclockThey didn’t always get the form factor and labeling right. The snooze button was a new highly desired feature, and everyone had to have it. Competitors were analyzing each others products, striving for parity. What was happening here?Ĭompetition of course. The snooze button soon became a common feature on nearly all flip clocks. Nearly every other clock manufacturer quickly followed suit. In 1956, General Electric-Telechron came out with the first alarm clock that featured a snooze button (“ 7H241 The Snooz-Alarm”). In the context of teaching UX, now we’re opening the floor to a conversation on accessibility. Light text on dark backgrounds is just one more way flip clocks made telling time all the easier for anyone with visual impairments - and by sticking to black and white, those with color blindness were also accommodated. Google and Apple didn’t invent the concept. In case you didn’t already guess, the white text on a black background is an early example of Dark Mode. Utilizing bright white Helvetica fonts on black flip boards, the Cifra 3’s time display was second to none. And in 1965, along came the legendary Cifra 3, which further paved the path towards modern style. The interface was significantly simplified: instead of a view or 12 hours, you’re just given the current time. They showed status clearly: displaying real numbers for each minute. Cataract removal, Lasik, and other correction procedures were science fiction in the early 1900s. Keep in mind: we had no contact lenses back then. For the visually impaired, seeing these tiny tick marks could be a challenge. The hours were usually shown clearly, but exact minutes? Those were often shown as small tick marks, if shown at all. Traditional analog clocks (featuring a circle with hour and minute arms) were an arguably weak interface. Why should this extra layer of complication exist? Removing it is a great example of simplification. If you wanted to tell what time it was, you needed to learn a set of numbers from a very bygone era. Older pre-WW2 clocks often featured weak typography. As it turns out flip clocks aren’t just whimsical time telling beasts from a bygone era: they’re great for highlighting key design concepts! A revolution of Typography, precision and simplification. The study of horology soon beat a path into my lesson plans. Finding Flippy touched off a micro-obsession on the topic of flip clocks. The story of how I arrived at flippy clocks as a means to teach UX is as strange as you might imagine, involving a day exploring abandoned buildings in New Jersey with a journalist friend who found “Flippy McFlipperson” - an early 1970s flip clock - in a decaying warehouse (yes, she named it). To highlight some of these concepts, I’ve begun using time itself as an example, and more specifically, flippy clocks. One of the classes I teach runs part time for ten weeks - which allows a fair bit of time to reincorporate key concepts. Over the past four years, I’ve worked as a UX mentor and instructor.
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