A small, egg-shaped alarm clock. Images come to mind of children's toys from a previous generation that seem to defy gravity as hidden weights provide the proper leverage. In the same vein, the egg wobbles, always providing its own energy to make its way back to equilibrium (a process that unfortunately takes over a minute to reach, often reorienting and moving itself for the duration). A quarter-sized porthole on the front contains the liquid crystal display, and a four-direction button pad resides on the back to provide additional functionality.
There’s no doubt that, putting personal opinions aside, the clock can be recognized as generally “fun” in the most broad of contexts relating to the basic look and feel of the device. It even comes in a variety of colors. What it does successfully is accentuate a room by being an active part of a user’s decorating. A clock is useful to have in all utilitarian contexts, but it’s not always something that adds to a space’s visual value. All of these generally nice touches add positive experiences to time keeping, but reaching the destination of actually using the clock is a whole new beast entirely.
Beginning where any common user would, the manual is fairly plain and straightforward. The introduction sets the stage for each of the 5 modes, and walks one through the initial steps required to get the clock to a point of useful operation. Physically inputing data into the device is similar to most other desktop clocks on the market, requiring some arbitrary combinations of holding and pressing keys that don’t immediately convey any kind of natural metaphor for their purpose. The idea of losing this manual for a person not on top of today’s internet resources is surely on track to receive a fancy paperweight by the time the batteries run dead, and a re-programming is required.
By far the most important feature of the clock is the way in which the user manages their way through the different functions on the display. The 5 features of the clock are cycled one at a time on the display. The functions are time, date, temperature, alarm, and a timer. Each mode has its own assigned background color that is backlit until idle. It’s worth noting that this is a very effective tool to assign more than one sensory identity to each function and eases memorization for human users. Observing how these functions are actually changed, the user simply taps (or makes any kind of contact with) the top of the egg. This action is entirely unrelated to the egg’s wobble, which can be difficult to discern. Trying to make contact with the surface while keeping the egg from rapidly swaying off its tiny base proves to be quite a difficult task.
As the video above shows, the action of mode-changing was not approached in a way that assumes it will be the most common action performed on it. Namely, the surface will not acknowledge additional hits in rapid succession to get to a particular mode. Easily recognizing where you are in the lineup of options helps very little when you have to patiently work your way to the desired state. It’s reminiscent of “missing” the channel on you wanted to watch on TV, and having to make your way “around the horn” to make it back to the channel you skipped. It only makes it worse that any accidental contact with the clock almost always triggers the change, which means several hits just to get it back to showing the time. To confound things further, the activation of the “sleep” function on the alarm is given significant interface priority on almost all alarm clocks that exist today. For the egg, putting the alarm clock to sleep involves this same, precise touch at the top, where most users would assume a simple nudge to initiate the wobble is the most sensible approach, as it also symbolically represents the crabby and reluctant nature that we all expose when having to wake up early in the morning. If you want to shut off the alarm, hitting one of the buttons on the back is required. And just to give the user one more reason to accidentally hit the top surface, a full grip is all but required to easily use the buttons on the back, otherwise its wobbly nature translates to constantly dodging your touch.
Outside the scope of arbitrary button commands, the information presented is relatively straight-forward and clear. The display itself is relatively small, and wouldn’t render itself legible much farther away from a desk or stand at or near the foot of a bed. One glaring oversight is absence of a continuous backlight. After a short duration from a status change, the colored backlight turns off and you’re left with a light-less liquid crystal display. Under anything but well-lighted conditions the egg’s visibility is next to zero.
With such an unstable nature, it seems fair to ask if Bob faces the same metaphorical fate as Humpty Dumpty. There are clearly good things to be said about the device. In a literal sea of desk clocks on the market today, there are few that stand out from the crowd. One can surmise that this drives Brookstone’s goal principles and therefore becomes a primary design solution. This is enough for most consumers; a major factor towards making a purchasing decision. In a culture that has grown accustomed to setting the time on the VCR, so have we grown accustomed to following a rigid clock-operating formula that does little to help its users. To say that it’s not particularly worse than the products surrounding it is not a compliment at all, and thus in the grand scheme of human-device interaction the 5-in-1 “Bob” Wobble Clock follows Humpty’s poor example and gets officially nominated for the Hall of Shame.
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