One of the most effective alarm clocks is to have children. You are guaranteed to be woken up bright and early. Well early, not so sure about the bright part.
Joking apart, having children does force you into a strict daily rhythm. They respond so well to doing the same thing, at the same time, and in the same order.
I always used to have poor sleep habits. Those habits have now been beaten out of me!
My point is that having a fastidious approach to sleep, and a strict sleep pattern means that you pretty much don't need an alarm clock. My children can't tell the time yet, but their internal body clocks are pretty accurate. Slowly I'm starting to trust my own internal clock as well.
Point of interest: To anyone who thinks that they can distract their wife's biological clock with a cat or dog, just don't. You end up with a pet and a child! Or in my case, after the first cat wasn't working, I got a second. Still didn't bloody work! :-)
I think the best alarms are ones that require you to get out of bed to turn off (meaning an iPhone placed across the room) - essentially it's not a kind of alarm but the positioning of it in your room. Once you are out of bed I don't think the UI of how you silence the alarm really matters.
Some of you have probably heard of Tocky and Clocky (http://www.nandahome.com/products/index.php). I've never used either but my guess is the concept is better than the execution. I've never felt a need to do anything but put my phone on the opposite side of my bedroom. Also, by doing this I have no way of checking my phone while in bed - either in the morning after waking up or at night before falling asleep.
Somehow in college I was able to get up, walk through my apartment, turn off my alarm, walk all the way back, and crawl back into bed, all without waking up. (Or, at least, without remembering later.)
The solution, for me, has been getting into a routine where I can consistently fall asleep earlier. Much easier to do now that I'm not pulling late nights all the time.
Likewise. My alarm was a playlist that would play through my speakers under the room's deck. My computer was in top, with the audio and power cables zip secured to prevent easy power loss.
Dang thing would go off, start getting louder (scripted for "gentle" wake-up), and I had to crawl out and onto the deck, log into my computer, and shut it off. ... And it was set to lock itself and start again in 10 minutes.
It works via wifi signal strength; I have to walk right up to my router in another room in order to shut it off (or you can reverse the trigger if you sleep near your router).
Across the room was never enough for me but walking to another room of the house wakes me up every time.
I like the "Shake Alarm" feature. It's cool to encourage an energetic response that will ensure you're actually "waking up" to silence it. I've seen more annoying versions [1], but it seems like you should be able to set the sensitivity here to strike the right balance which is valuable.
I agree that the "Shake Alarm" is the only feature that I think uniquely helps with waking up.
Is there any evidence (other than anecdotal) that having a laborious alarm clock actually helps people get up? I feel like making it harder to hit the snooze button might only accomplish that, and either way people just go back to bed.
By far the most effective alarm clock I've ever used is Alarm Clock Xtreme for Android. The killer feature is the math problems functionality, whereby you cannot disable the alarm, short of removing the battery, until you've solved math problems at your chosen difficulty.
Solving 5 relatively simple problems like "17 * 12 - 34" gets my brain going like no other alarm - I am fully alert by the end of it. My mental arithmetic has gotten better too :)
There are also tons of other configuration options in the app.
That was actually the original idea. To use math questions as an alarm style but we opted to go with the Shake to wake option to get people moving in the morning. Plus it's more tactile and goes well with the other alarm styles of slapping the phone to snooze and flipping the phone over to turn off alarms.
For me the best choice is still an analog alarm clock, because it doesn't tempt me to check my mails or read my feeds in the morning instead of preparing for truly important work.
This is a great product as an alarm clock, but trying to build better alarm clocks is fighting the wrong battle. The real solution is just to get enough sleep so that you wake up automatically.
Joking apart, having children does force you into a strict daily rhythm. They respond so well to doing the same thing, at the same time, and in the same order.
I always used to have poor sleep habits. Those habits have now been beaten out of me!
My point is that having a fastidious approach to sleep, and a strict sleep pattern means that you pretty much don't need an alarm clock. My children can't tell the time yet, but their internal body clocks are pretty accurate. Slowly I'm starting to trust my own internal clock as well.