Analog and Digital Time

I realized that I needed a watch when I was just about to take a walk to the park.

It was a sunny spring afternoon, and I had just finished sorting out a tangle in my work. This meant I had earned myself a little break. What better way to spend it than to leave all this digital-remote-employee-equipment behind and launch myself out of the house, out of the mindset of a calculating problem solver, and into the mindset of a Labrador walking in a sunny park. Warm. Simple. Embodied.

But, there was a problem. My work day was not over, and I had another meeting in 27 minutes. How would I know when to wrap up the excursion in time to not be late? My eyes flicked to my only timepiece: the cellphone face up on my desk — beeping, blinking, and sputtering constant pleas for me to attend to some new issue. I decided to leave my phone, and take my chances instead.

It was a wonderful stroll, and I arrived back home actually a few minutes early. Lucky as I was to make this meeting, I knew that I needed something to tell me the time that wasn't a digital nag. I needed a watch!

Almost everyone used to wear a watch. They probably started to fall out of fashion over the same period that cellphones rose to dominance. As a child, I wore a watch perhaps once or twice as a novelty, but once I reached the age where I cared about time, I already had a cellphone. So, I never saw utility in these devices. Why carry something on your wrist if your phone can already tell you the time?

The modern day watch wearer has three main practical reasons to keep a watch in addition to their phone:

• A cellphone may run out of battery, but a watch will seldom let you down.
• Sometimes, or even often, one might want to leave their cellphone behind without losing track of time (such as in my excursion to the park).
• It is easier and faster to tell the time on your wrist compared to pulling something out of your pocket, especially if both your hands are occupied.
• Practicality aside, a watch can also be a fashion statement. There are some really neat looking watches that can add a unique accent to your wardrobe. Of course, sometimes the statement a watch is meant to make is just, "Hey look I'm rich", which is boring and a poor reason to wear a watch.

Anyone who decides to start wearing a watch for any of the above reasons has to first ask themselves a crucial question: analog or digital? In general, it seems like people who are more concerned about the fashion statement of their watch go for analog, and people who want a practical timepiece go for the high-tech digital watch. 

Myself, I am mainly concerned with the practical purposes. However, after putting some thought into the question (probably just a bit more than it deserves) I realized it actually isn't so clear that digital watches are practically better. There are some interesting tradeoffs to consider.

The main advantage of digital watches is pretty clear, the clock is easier to read with a quick glance. Additionally, digital watches tend to be cheaper and to have extra tools like timers, and alarms built in.

The argument for the analog watch is not as straightforward, but I believe that although they are read slower, analog watches offer a more intuitive and accurate representation of time of time to the user, and one that is more pleasant to read. In other words, the user experience is superior. There are three main reasons that make this so.

Visual-Spatial Understanding

For one, and most importantly, instead of looking at symbolic numbers like you would with a digital clock, on analog you are looking primarily at angles and proportions, making use of the visual-spatial part of your brain to aid in understanding the relative size of time durations. Essentially, its a tiny geometry puzzle every time you look at your wrist, which adds a little flavor to your time-telling. In addition to being more fun, understanding time through the visual-spatial faculties I believe allows for a better intuitive grasp of time than if understood with only the symbolic faculties.

To think about this, consider: How much of an hour is 5 minutes? When written in the symbolic form, fractions expose a natural human shortcoming in grasping the relative size of numbers. Through some numerical illusion, to many it seems like 5/60 is a smaller fraction than 1/12. However, 5 minutes is indeed a full 1/12th of an hour.

On an analog clock any such numerical illusions are dispelled. One can look closely at the actual proportion of an hour the 5 minute slice represents, allowing you to visually comprehend the fraction all at once. And, of course an analog clock doesn't stop one from taking in the numeral time values as well (which are listed around the edges). The visual-spatial way of understanding time on an analog clock is purely additive with the symbolic understanding. You get two representations in one glance on an analog clock.

Bret Victor has a lot of interesting things to say about non-symbolic representation in user experience; if you haven't seen it, his lecture on representations of thought is absolutely fascinating. I definitely recommend!

Continuity

The analog clock displays the current time as a point on a line, rather than an isolated value. The eye can trace both backwards, seeing the proportions of the hour or day which have already elapsed up to this point, and forwards to the unexplored future.

Looking backwards lets you reminisce over the day.  It may also help align your subjective experience of the passage of time to the movement of the dials. 

Looking forwards on the line is proactive. It leads you to question: What is next? How will the minutes and hours of my day be filled?

Cyclicism

A final important point is that analog clocks offer an intrinsic sense for the cyclical nature of the day, something which digital time representations are hilariously bad at. What happens after 11:59? after 12:59? The analog representation carries the answer to these questions built into the platform.

This is more important for children initially learning about how the 24 hour day works, and less important for experienced time-tellers. Still, I think constantly encountering the built in cyclicism while reading an analog clock increases time fluency. It also may give you a better sense of the cyclical nature of your own day-to-day life and habits, for better or worse.

⋯

Since thinking all of this over, would you believe it, I did buy an analog watch. My personal review is that I can at least confirm the analog watch is more fun and quicker to read than the digital clock I previously used on phone. And I do now conceptualize time periods less in terms of number of minutes, and more in terms of visual fractions of the hour, but I can't say for sure whether I have a better understanding of time as a result of that. Also, although it is a simple watch, it does upgrade my fashion more than I thought it would.

So, I like the watch. However I will also say that I've gained a huge amount of appreciation for the the practical considerations of a digital watch. Timers and alarms in particular are something that I have realized may be just as important to separate from one's smartphone as just telling the time, and I am missing it in my watch. All-in-all I still think the tradeoff of an analog watch still may be worth it for the better time telling experience. But a digital watch in the analog style that also has timers and alarms would clearly be the best of both.

Also, without any hard evidence, I continue to suspect that people who mostly tell time from analog watches for a long time have a more accurate internal sense of the duration of a given period of time. I realized this might be an interesting thing to test in an experiment. In fact it could be fairly easy to test in an online interactive survey.

The survey could analyze responses from two groups, people who mostly tell time from digital watches, and people who mostly tell time from analog watches — participant age must be collected to later adjust for the age disparity between analog and digital watch wearers. Survey members would undergo a time quiz in which they put aside any time pieces and guess a duration of time, which can be assessed for accuracy (ex. "approximate the amount of time since you began the survey"). If analog time tellers have a better mental representation of time they should be more accurate at guessing time durations. Could be an interesting survey experiment.