Thanks for clicking! I'm working on a project to design a better alarm clock, and your click on that ad is going to help me decide which direction to go in.

If you'd like to know more about my project, click here. And thanks again!

The alarm clock is a standard feature of mobile phones, and an incredibly popular one. More people use the alarm clock of their phone daily than send text messages or browse the mobile Internet; by this measure it's the most used feature of a phone, bar making calls. And yet of all the functions in your phone, the alarm clock is one of the most staid - unaffected by advances in technology, connectivity or our behaviour.

I've been looking at the alarm clock that shipped with my Samsung Galaxy S2. It feels over-complicated to an intimidating degree: separate options for Alarm type and Alarm tone, a selection of possible snooze settings, something called "Smart Alarm" which sits there on-screen bereft of explanation, and the ability to give your alarm a name. 9 input fields, just to say "wake me up"? This can be improved.

I've been thinking for a while that there's some interesting work to be done here, so I'm using a piece of coursework for my MSc to have a look at alarm clocks, from an HCI perspective. To kick this off I'm doing some research into how real people (that's you) use their alarm clocks, and how they manage their sleep-time. So I'd be awfully grateful if you could take a few minutes (literally) to fill out this survey on the subject.

This will be a design project (rather than a research or evaluation piece): I'm going to produce at least a couple of iterations of design for an improved piece of alarm clock software. Now, I've always admired what I've read of Pixar and their process of doing daily design critiques:

"At Pixar, daily animation work is shown in an incomplete state to the whole crew. This process helps people get over any embarrassment about sharing unfinished work—so they become even more creative. It enables creative leads to communicate important points to the entire crew at once"

What I'm working on now is a solo project which won't naturally give me many options to get feedback, and there's no need for me to communicate aspects of the design to a wider group; but I'm still interested in understanding what it feels like to work in that Pixar fashion, and how it could improve the end product.

So I'm going to post regular updates of unfinished work here and invite comment; I think my readership is small enough that I know most of you, and I think you'll have some interesting opinions. And if you've read this far, please do pop over to that survey - it'll give the work I'm doing some grounding in reality.

Update: 3:25pm on Wednesday 14th December 2011, I'm marking the survey as no longer accepting responses now, after 24 hours. Thank you *very* much to every single one of the 187 people who kindly gave up a few minutes to help with this.

One of our assignments for Human-Computer Interaction was to carry out a formal usability evaluation of a game. Unsurprisingly my group chose a mobile game, X-Construction Lite, and did a study on it: first individual evaluations using a cognitive walkthrough (AKA "having a play") and referencing Nielsen's heuristics to find and categorise specific issues.

We then did a lightweight usability study by ambushing students outside the campus library and videoing them playing the first level of the game, in exchange for cake (pear tart from Real Patisserie, if you were wondering). Interesting exercise; it's a good game that seems to have gathered nearly 70,000 reviews in the marketplace (and to which we're all now addicted), but our testing showed up some consistent and fundamental problems with the gameplay.

We've submitted a full report, but you can see the presentation we gave summarising the project on slideshare here. Credit due to other team members: Andy Keavey, Queen Atifa Ododo, Mariana Rojas-Morao and Merve Yildirim.

I can't help but direct you to a photo of one of the other groups, showing off their Plants vs Zombies review in appropriate attire.

There's a little article I wrote for the Vexed Digital newsletter, over here on their web site. It's all about Kindle Fire and what it means for the tablet ecosystem and Google; I worked it all out the other week, and it only seems fair to tell you.

Ever heard of superoptimizers? No, neither had I, until a lecture with Des Watson as part of Topics in Computer science, a module I'm taking this term.

They're comically interesting: a brute-force approach to writing software. Instead of trying to work out the most efficient way to code your program, just try all the possible combinations of instructions; I mean, how many can there be?

Well, lots, actually - and that's one of the big problems with the approach, finding ways to cut down the space of possible programs you look through. But the good news is that superoptimizers have a tendency to find bizarre, curious ways of taking advantage of specific characteristics of the hardware which humans don't tend to notice. Show a superoptimized piece of code to a human being - even, say, an architect of the processor it runs on - and she'll scratch her head and wonder how it can work.

Anyhow, I've chosen superoptimizers as the subject for my end-of-term project, so here's a literature review I've written on the topic as part of my coursework, if you're interested in finding out more.

And thanks in advance for anyone who dares point out that code *I* write looks like it's been brute-forced into existence…