Here I go again, bashing another product for poor design. This time it is my digital watch. I have two watches, and I have lost the instruction manual for both. On one of the watches, I managed to set the alarm to 12:00 AM and was unable to cancel it. I tried pressing all combinations of the 4 buttons, but couldn't reset it. I finally gave up and had to remove the battery to reset it. The other watch, I never change the time on it to compensate for daylight savings. I just add an hour for six months of the year. Why? You guessed it. I don't know how to set time on it.
The first watch I got was a mechanical watch with one thumb screw on it. You wound the watch every night by turning the thumb screw clockwise. Whenever the watch ran fast/slow (which it did quite often), you just pull the thumb screw out and rotate it in either direction to set the time. And, once you were done, push it in until it clicks. As simple as that. I did not even get a user manual with it!
And now, we have all these sophisticated watches with chronographs, stopwatches, multi-zone times and all that, and we can't even come up with a simple user interface to it all. Most digital watches have 4 buttons on them. One of them is reserved for light. The other three, in some weird combination, allow you to use/set/reset all the operations. I don't know if any watch maker has figured out a decent and intuitive UI for this.
How would I design a digital watch?
Simple. Create a digital watch with one button, again a rotating thumb wheel. Since this is a digital watch, it comes with a LCD display, and here is how you would use it:
Click the (only) button to summon a UI.
Rotate the thumb wheel to walk through the menu.
Click the button again to select items in the menu.
Done.
How much simpler can it be? All the operations can be performed by clicking the button, and rotating the wheel as and when necessary. Borrowing from the old mechanical watch gives us the best UI. Of course, we may end up with some cascading menus, but, hey, you won't need a user manual to use it.
Of course, it would automatically set time based on the WWVB atomic time signal that it catches via radio waves.