Snooze button. Sleep button. Nap button!

I love our new alarm clock, the first one I’ve ever owned that makes sense. After a year or so of using a dopey little travel alarm clock, I can finally set my alarm without professional frustration.

This alarm clock feels like an interaction designer really took their time with it, thought it through, tossed out a few “because this is how we always do it” alarm clock interactions, and re-designed it to be elegant.

The biggest difference is the large A and B buttons to set two different times. While most alarm clocks have separate controls for setting a time and activating the alarm, this one brilliantly combines the two.

First, notice the A and B buttons. They activate either of the two alarms. Here, the alarms are off:

Push on A and Alarm A is active. Same with B, as shown next.

Setting the alarm times couldn’t be easier. When the alarm is activated, crank the knob on the left to adjust Alarm A or crank the knob on the right for Alarm B. Crank one way to go forward in time, the other way to go back. That’s it. The interaction designer here, bless them, figured out that you only really adjust the alarm when you actually use it. Plus, the bright orange backgrounds offer a can’t-miss-it confirmation from across the room that the alarm is active. Brilliant.

But wait, there’s more.

My alarm clock has a Snooze button, a Sleep button and… a Nap button! The first Nap button that I’ve ever seen. At first glance, this is really odd. Snooze Sleep Nap. They’re all synonyms (mostly), yet each button does something different, serves a different purpose.

We all know the Snooze button. The Snooze button was first marketed in 1956 by General Electric-Telechron. The Snooz-Alarm. (Hey, it’s the 50th anniversary of the Snooze button! Where’s the parade?) Telechron made a wide variety of clocks from about 1917 until 1959, merging and unmerging with General Electric along the way. In 1959, Westclox marketed the Drowse. Notice the separate buttons for 5 or 10 minutes. And as usual, a woman’s finger pushing it.

The Snooze button works in tandem with the alarm itself. The alarm goes off at your set time. Then, you have the option to push the button and snooze for a bit more, putting you in a “nebulous cognitive space where time has no ascribed form or structure” (from Twitch of the Snooze Button, formerly at Brock Craft). At the end of the snooze time (five, seven, nine, ten, whatever minutes is built in), the alarm comes back on. This cycle continues until you really get up. Some clocks will stop this after an hour, figuring that you really don’t care about catching your bus.

The Sleep button is a fairly recent invention (I think). Behaving the opposite of the Snooze button, it keeps the radio on until the time you set, in minutes. Want to fall asleep to the gentle sounds of the local public classical radio station? Set your Sleep button to 30 minutes.

But my new alarm clock has a Nap button. It works probably exactly as you assume, which means it was designed right. Push it once and the alarm goes off in 10 minutes. Push it repeatedly to increase the amount, 10, 20, 30, 60, 90, 120, off. Perfect for that Saturday afternoon nap. I love the Nap button.

So we now have three different buttons to manage our sleep patterns, Snooze, Sleep, Nap. It’s no longer just an alarm clock. It’s now a sleep management system. Three different words that mean more or less the same thing. Three different buttons that have very distinct interactions. Three different buttons that define the taxonomy of sleeping.