Snooze no more: what flippy clocks can teach us about UX design
By: Joseph Anastasio
Tags: Usability, User Experience, Design Process, UX Design, Design Patterns

Flippy McFlipperson

Over the past four years, I’ve worked as a UX mentor and instructor. One of the classes I teach runs part time for ten weeks — which allows a fair bit of time to reincorporate key concepts. To highlight some of these concepts, I’ve begun using time itself as an example, and more specifically, flippy clocks.

The story of how I arrived at flippy clocks as a means to teach UX is as strange as you might imagine, involving a day exploring abandoned buildings in New Jersey with a journalist friend who found “Flippy McFlipperson” — an early 1970s flip clock — in a decaying warehouse (yes, she named it). Finding Flippy touched off a micro-obsession on the topic of flip clocks. The study of horology soon beat a path into my lesson plans. As it turns out flip clocks aren’t just whimsical time telling beasts from a bygone era: they’re great for highlighting key design concepts!

A revolution of Typography, precision and simplification.

Older pre-WW2 clocks often featured weak typography. Many still used roman numerals. If you wanted to tell what time it was, you needed to learn a set of numbers from a very bygone era. Why should this extra layer of complication exist? Removing it is a great example of simplification.

Traditional analog clocks (featuring a circle with hour and minute arms) were an arguably weak interface. The hours were usually shown clearly, but exact minutes? Those were often shown as small tick marks, if shown at all. For the visually impaired, seeing these tiny tick marks could be a challenge. Keep in mind: we had no contact lenses back then. Cataract removal, Lasik, and other correction procedures were science fiction in the early 1900s.



Flip clocks put an end to all this. They showed status clearly: displaying real numbers for each minute. Gone for good were the roman numerals. The interface was significantly simplified: instead of a view or 12 hours, you’re just given the current time. And in 1965, along came the legendary Cifra 3, which further paved the path towards modern style. Utilizing bright white Helvetica fonts on black flip boards, the Cifra 3’s time display was second to none.

In case you didn’t already guess, the white text on a black background is an early example of Dark Mode. Google and Apple didn’t invent the concept. Light text on dark backgrounds is just one more way flip clocks made telling time all the easier for anyone with visual impairments — and by sticking to black and white, those with color blindness were also accommodated. In the context of teaching UX, now we’re opening the floor to a conversation on accessibility.

Competitive Analysis

In 1956, General Electric-Telechron came out with the first alarm clock that featured a snooze button (“7H241 The Snooz-Alarm”). Nearly every other clock manufacturer quickly followed suit. The snooze button soon became a common feature on nearly all flip clocks. What was happening here?

Competition of course. Competitors were analyzing each others products, striving for parity. The snooze button was a new highly desired feature, and everyone had to have it. They didn’t always get the form factor and labeling right. The Panasonic RC-6493 for example, utilized a small button for snoozing, alongside three switches for Volume, Tone, and Selector. All four of these buttons and knobs were the same size and felt the same. The button was also labeled ‘doze’. ‘Snooze’ would soon become the accepted label.

Clock design was iterating hard at the time. One more area was the alarm itself: that loud ringing or buzzing alarm of older clocks was definitely not user friendly. How might we design a better waking experience? Cue the lesson on design thinking.



The answer for many manufacturers was to combine your bedside clock with that huge old radio in the living room. Clock Radios soon became a thing. Technology was progressing, and electronic components were being fed a steady diet of pym particles, become ever smaller over time.

No, pym particles are not real, and yes a ton of innovation was happening under the hood to decrease component sizes — which impacted the form factor of these clocks. Panasonic, a masterful manufacturer of combo flip clock radios, iterated significantly on their designs. In 1971 they came out with the RC-6530 which had no snooze button, and was contained in a 11.5” wide, 6.5” deep case. They also began selling the RC-6493, which not only included a snooze feature, but also included a calendar. It was constructed in a slimmer, more rectangular design (13” wide by 5” deep)– a testament to Panasonic’s own innovations of minimizing the size of the electronics necessary to make it all function. Also included was a headphone jack and ports for external speakers. They were constantly iterating, and assessing their competitors. They were experimenting with features to add value for their users. While the calendar feature didn’t catch on at the time, one could argue it came back with smart phone. Good design is all about iteration.

Flippy & his buddy Cal

The transition from Flip to Digital

As the years passed, the clock radio remained a mandatory bedside appliance in most homes. Innovation continued to occur in the internal parts — digital interfaces took the place of the old mechanical flippy boards, allowing for even slimmer designs. With old flip clocks, users couldn’t wind the numbers backwards at daylight savings time. The ability set and reset time more easily was a new feature making users lives simpler. Radio circuit boards and components grew ever smaller. Eventually the foot long clocks that previously could weigh in over three pounds were now small enough to fit in one hand. There’s also a hidden lesson in users knowing their problems but not having great solutions for them: did you have a parent or grandparent who would unplug their flip clock during autumn’s daylight savings time rather than wind it through the hours in order to ‘fall back’ one hour?

Skeuomorphism & Staying on trend.

As clocks progressed from Flip to Digital, many retained that familiar wood paneled look. This finally fell out of style in the early 1980s. Plastics suddenly didn’t require hiding. The age of home computers was upon us. A good example of this is a 1980s clock I found in my grandfather-in-law’s condo. Designed to look like a small computer, it is a fine example of a company trying to keep their product looking on trend. At the time it must have been cool enough for a few people to buy it, while today it would probably sit on a thrift store shelf generating extremely confused looks from anyone under 20. Some schools in the UK started removing old analog clocks because kids couldn’t read them.

Regardless of how ridiculous these designs might look to young whippersnappers today, they were on trend in their day. They sold. They worked fine, silently blipping away the minutes with zero character whatsoever. People loved them. In the case of flippy clocks, there’s a whole website dedicated to maintaining and chatting about them.