Smart Alarm

Overview

Smart Alarm was an innovative, fully self-designed and self-implemented alarm clock app for the iPhone. Available almost since the launch of the App Store, it was my first mobile app.

The app addressed a specific problem: while the iPhone allowed setting different alarm times for different weekdays, these alarms would also go off on public holidays and during vacation. Smart Alarm also featured a sleep cycle alarm that used the accelerometer to find the optimal wake-up moment within a set time window.

The Challenge

What started as a simple alarm clock grew into a feature-rich app over the years. Key challenges included:

• Preventing unwanted alarms on holidays and vacation days using location and calendar data.
• Integrating multiple data sources (sensors, weather, location) for intelligent wake-up decisions.
• Managing the complexity that had grown over the years while keeping the app intuitive.
• Designing for a set-and-forget workflow where users interact briefly and infrequently.

The Process

As the sole designer and developer, I owned the entire product lifecycle:

• Problem Identification: Born from personal frustration with iOS alarm limitations.
• Feature Development: Iteratively added features based on user feedback: holiday detection, weather-based adjustments, location awareness.
• Conceptual Redesign: Redesigned the entire app around the set-and-forget workflow. The app is opened briefly to toggle an alarm, so short paths were a key design goal.
• High-Fidelity Prototyping: Created detailed screen prototypes in Sketch for the redesigned version.
• User Feedback Integration: Continuously incorporated user suggestions, including location-based alarm toggling and the EnRoute feature.

The Solution

Key features designed and built:

• Holiday-Aware Alarms: Crowdsourced database of public holidays from around the world, combined with location tracking to prevent unwanted alarms.
• Personal Vacation Days: Private area for custom vacation dates to avoid being woken on days off.
• Weather-Based Wake-Up: Monitors weather conditions and wakes the user earlier in bad weather (e.g. frost) to allow extra time.
• Location-Based Automation: Automatically enables or disables individual alarms based on current position.
• EnRoute Alarm: Enter a public transit destination stop and get woken up just before arrival.
• Nightstand Mode: Displays time, weather forecast, appointments and reminders as a ticker.

Results & Impact

• One of the first intelligent alarm clock apps in the App Store.
• The set-and-forget redesign significantly reduced interaction complexity while adding powerful automation features.
• The EnRoute alarm feature was a direct result of user feedback, demonstrating responsive product development.

The app was discontinued in 2012 due to time constraints.