The Principle of 'Inconvenient Interaction' Behind Alarmy

User service design that leverages inconvenience

Every morning, many people start their day with Alarmy. Some might view it as just a simple wake-up alarm that rouses you from your morning slumber. However, it is no coincidence that Alarmy has maintained its undisputed position as the #1 alarm app in the global market for years.

How did Alarmy create such special value out of the universal problem of waking up? I found the answer in a unique interaction design concept from the HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) field: Inconvenient Interaction.

In the HCI field, the primary direction of service design is usually to make things easy and convenient for people to use. Accordingly, analyzing and understanding user behavior and mental models to design tailored, convenient interactions has been a crucial design goal.

But not all designs always pursue just convenience. Some designs intentionally introduce inconvenience to the user to solve a problem. For example, as seen in Figure 1, requiring a smile to open a fridge door, forcing exercise to use a microwave, or locking smartphones simultaneously to focus on group activities—these inconvenient interactions serve as tools to achieve design objectives.

Professor Rekimoto, who first proposed that inconvenient interaction could work well for behavior change problems, suggested four principles for its success:

First, the inconvenience should be temporary, but the resulting benefits should be long-term.

Second, the inconvenience should be connected to a daily need.

Third, the balance between necessity and inconvenience must be well-maintained.

Fourth, provide immediate positive feedback when the imposed inconvenience is accepted.

Tailored to the specific use case of a mobile alarm, Alarmy is a service designed to align perfectly with Professor Rekimoto's four principles. Let's take a closer look at the principles of inconvenient interaction found in Alarmy.

1. Temporary Inconvenience and Long-term Benefits

The biggest feature that distinguishes Alarmy from regular alarms is its mission alarm. These missions intentionally create inconvenience by forcing specific actions when you wake up in the morning. Right after waking up, people experience what's known as sleep inertia—the phenomenon of wanting to keep sleeping or easily falling back asleep even after waking up. Alarmy's mission alarm helps users quickly escape this sleep inertia so they can definitively wake up at their target time.

To turn off the alarm, the user has to engage in an inconvenient interaction, like solving a math problem or taking a photo. However, this inconvenience is brief, and the benefit of waking up at the intended time can be huge, ultimately leading to good waking habits and a healthy daily rhythm in the long run. These benefits are the reason why so many people willingly choose and endure the inconvenience Alarmy provides every morning.

2. Inconvenience Connected to a Daily Need

Since waking up in the morning is a routine action everyone performs, it perfectly fits the second principle of connecting it to something you have to do every day. Compared to other behaviors, waking up is relatively regular, occurring around the same time and in the same environment. Connecting an inconvenient interaction to this daily behavior can solidify the entire process into a new habit, helping users consistently maintain their target behavior.

Alarmy effectively addressed a daily need that people universally experience. In particular, the problem of waking up in the morning is an area largely unaffected by country or culture, which served as the backdrop for the service's easy global expansion.

3. The Balance Between Necessity and Inconvenience

The Alarmy app is delicately crafted to strike a good balance between the user's need to wake up and the inconvenience caused by the mission alarm. Users can choose an appropriate mission depending on their personal situation and can also adjust the difficulty for each mission. It forces inconvenience, but offers a variety of choices so that it can be tailored to the individual user.

From an HCI perspective, the task load of Alarmy's mission alarm can be broadly divided into physical load and cognitive load. For instance, the photo or squat missions are based on physical load, while solving math or puzzle problems is based on cognitive load. Since preference and tolerance for physical or cognitive loads can vary by person and situation, the ability to choose from such diverse missions has likely helped attract many users.

Furthermore, from the perspective of Professor Fogg's Behavior Model, mission alarms are highly effective for behavior change. Fogg explains the manifestation of human behavior through three factors: Motivation, Ability, and Prompts.

The higher the motivation and ability for an action, the more likely that action is to be performed. A prompt refers to a trigger that induces the behavior, and it is known to be a more influential factor in behavior change compared to motivation and ability. Alarmy provides appropriate prompts based on the user's motivation and ability—namely, by adjusting the type and difficulty of the mission alarm—to help manifest the target behavior.

4. Positive Feedback for Accepting Inconvenience

Professor Rekimoto noted that providing feedback—much like a game—so that users can better recognize and feel more satisfied with the positive results when they overcome an inconvenience can lead to the success of inconvenient interaction. Fundamentally, due to the nature of waking up to a mobile alarm app, users naturally receive positive feedback: a sense of accomplishment for waking up on time and the readiness to start their daily schedule well.

Moreover, the wake-up history and cheering messages provided by Alarmy motivate users to continue enduring this inconvenience in the future. Such positive feedback will encourage users to consistently make the effort to wake up on time, contributing to building a positive morning habit.

Users do not easily choose or endure inconvenience. That's because they are used to easy and comfortable services. Overcoming this barrier and achieving success was possible for Alarmy because it meticulously considered the principles of inconvenient interaction. Currently, Alarmy is contributing to the HCI field by providing an empirical example of inconvenient interaction and expanding academic knowledge. I expect Alarmy's value to continue growing in the future.

In particular, it seems Alarmy can create future value in the globally growing digital healthcare and sleep tech sectors. Sleep has an incredibly important impact on physical and mental health, and many studies have reported that sleep quality is closely related to a regular lifestyle [4].

According to the market research firm Global Market Insights, the global digital healthcare market is projected to grow to a $504.4 billion scale by 2025, and the global sleep tech market is expected to reach $32.1 billion by 2026.

If Alarmy expands its primary service scope from traditional wake-up events to encompass everything from going to sleep to starting the daily routine, and grows into a service that comprehensively connects and supports these moments, I anticipate it will be fully recognized for its unique value in the future digital healthcare space.

Furthermore, backed by a massive user base, it can provide objective data on global sleep and wake-up behaviors, which is expected to lead to monetization expansion by creating value-adds based on this data. For example, it might be possible to develop new monetization models by linking sleep and wake-up data with targeted marketing or insurance and financial programs.

Considering the special meaning and importance of the morning hours, I am incredibly excited for the new kinds of mornings Alarmy will unlock in the future.

[1] Rekimoto, Jun and Tsujita, Hitomi, “Inconvenient Interactions: An Alternative Interaction Design Approach to Enrich Our Daily Activities,” In Proceedings of the 2014 International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, ACM, 2014.

[2] Ko, Minsam, Choi, Seungwoo, Yatani, Koji and Lee, Uichin, “Lock n’ LoL: Group-Based Limiting Assistance App to Mitigate Smartphone Distractions in Group Activities,” In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 2016.

[3] Fogg, B. J. (2020). Tiny habits: the small changes that change everything. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

[4] Timothy H. Monk, Charles F. Reynolds III, Daniel J. Buysse, Jean M. DeGrazia, and David J. Kupfer, “The Relationship Between Lifestyle Regularity and Subjective Sleep Quality,” Chronobiology International, 20(1), 2003.

This article is based on Issue 344 of DBR (Dong-A Business Review).

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