The smartwatch presents a new set of challenges for app designers, many of whom have been exploring the potential of these new devices since the crowd-funded Pebble watch launched in 2013.
Android Wear smartwatches came on to the market in 2014, and the Apple Watch, you may have noticed, is on sale from 24 April. Many developers are launching their apps this week to coincide with the launch, often the culmination of at least two years exploratory design work.
How have they used experiences of mobile app design to inform smartwatch apps? How are they differentiating watch apps from those on mobile without duplicating functionality? And how does a designer approach planning out an interface on an impossibly small screen?
It’s all about the ‘glances’
Lots of developers are talking about “glances” right now: the idea of smartwatch apps as things you glance at for a few seconds, with one or two simple interactions, before going back to whatever you were doing.
“Quick, quick, quick. I think Apple has it right with glances,” says Eric Gillin, executive director of cookery service Epicurious, which is launching the app Smart Timer in tandem with the launch of the Apple Watch.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if folks eventually began watching videos on the watch — people will watch videos on anything — but at the start, the watch seems like it provides you with quick feedback, small bits of information that you can transact on. Deeper actions will occur on the phone.”
“It’s important to remember that users are busy, and want to be able to interact quickly and simply with their favourite products,” says Boone Spooner, director of mobile product at radio streaming app TuneIn.
“The watch makes this even more true – it’s a simple glance, quick interaction device. This means that you need to get the most important information in front of your users as quickly and often as possible.”
The current crop of smartwatches rely on being paired with a nearby smartphone, which is sharpening developers’ awareness of which tasks are better left to the parent device.
“Smartwatch users won’t spend a lot of time tapping through loads of menus, the smartphone is brilliant for those kind of tasks,” says Dave Slocombe, mobile apps product owner at travel service TheTrainline.
Anything requiring forms or nested menus will fail
“Anything that requires multiple taps or precise cursor placement, such as filling out forms, editing documents or navigating nested menus are all likely to work better on a phone, whereas dictating short messages or tapping a simple set of buttons could be better on the watch,” says Jamie Hull, vice president of mobile products at Evernote.
Some developers think that the best smartwatch apps will require no user input at all: just a glance when they serve up timely information. “I think it’s going to work best when there’s no user input, so when it’s totally context driven,” says Marc Chesworth, mobile development manager at mxData, which makes transport apps including Tube Map.
“The most effective ones will be the input mechanisms where you aren’t interacting directly, so your heart rate reaches a certain beat or you arrive at a certain location or it’s a certain time. They’re inputs, loosely termed.”
‘Ordering a taxi in one tap’
Other developers talk about designing not just for the device, but for the behaviour. “The Apple Watch is all about an exercise in reductive design. What’s the bare minimum set of features and functionality that make for a compelling experience, but doesn’t overdo it?” says Matt Galligan, chief executive of mobile news startup Circa.
“Apps that focus on that question will succeed. People won’t hold their wrists up to look at their watch for more than 30 seconds at a time, so apps should focus on experiences that will work under those constraints.”
Chesworth agrees. “Anything that requires you to spend too long on it [will fail]. If you’re spending 10 seconds looking at your watch and moving through menus, you’ve failed as a user-experience designer.”
That’s why even media companies making smartwatch apps aren’t seeing them as devices for long interactions.
“I do not believe watch-type wearables will be a reading device in any meaningful sense. It’s too uncomfortable, too intrusive,” says The Economist’s vice president of product management Robin Raven. “Ordering a taxi in one tap I can see. Reading a daily briefing I can’t.”
It’s interesting to see some companies talking about the social experience – as in socialising with people in the real world – coming in to their design thinking.
“The smartwatch sceptics question the need for the watch when you have a smartphone in your pocket. But it is entirely possible that we are all underestimating the difference between twisting your wrist and reaching into your pocket to check in,” says Alex Wellen, chief product officer for CNN.
“Social etiquette in certain circumstances combined with the milliseconds one gains in replacing ‘phone moments’ with ‘watch moments’ could be profound.”
“If you’re hanging out in a bar or restaurant with friends, it’s a lot more discreet tapping your watch than taking your smartphone out of your pocket to check something,” says Daniel Danker, chief product officer at Shazam. “It doesn’t feel like it’s taking you out of the conversation.”
What about notification overload?
One concern I have about smartwatches is notification overload. It’s bad enough on a smartphone, at least until you take control of it and block lots of apps from pinging you at every opportunity. Will that also be necessary with smartwatches?
“My gut says it’ll be a bit intrusive. I have a hundred apps on my phone. And over the last couple weeks, I’ll say that half of these seem to have some kind of Apple Watch update,” says Epicurious’s Gillin.
“When I get my Apple Watch, are all 50 of those apps going to spring to life and start sending me notifications every twelve seconds?”
Maybe. “I believe that the watch is going to be overrun with notifications at first - it’s one of the primary methods for alerting users to new information in this format,” says TuneIn’s Spooner.
“Therefore many app developers will default to using it to alert their users when needed. Although it is yet to be seen, this will probably end up with over-notifying a user – a sort of ‘cry wolf’ scenario for app updates.”
The key here will be developers thinking hard about when their apps should send alerts to smartwatches.
“Ideally, apps only send notifications when they have information that will become less valuable if the user doesn’t see it immediately; in other words, when there is something time or location sensitive in what is being communicated,” says Evernote’s Jamie Hull.
“Too many notifications is going to get very annoying very quickly. But the ones that get it right will be in for a huge attention uplift,” says The Economist’s Raven.
And those who get it wrong? “When used in the right context notifications on the Apple Watch are extremely powerful and useful,” says Jason Tusman, lead product designer for streaming music service Pandora. “The trick is to not bombard the user with frivolous and constant notifications, which could lead to notification blindness.”
‘The right notification to the right person’
Other developers point out that, for Apple Watch at least, notifications can be more than just annoying alerts.
“One interesting thing that Apple Watch brings to the table is the ability to have notifications that update while you’re looking at them,” says Joe Hughes, mobile lead at transport app Citymapper.
For his app, that means a “get off the bus or train” notification on the watch, with a blue dot showing the user’s live, moving position relative to the last few dots.
“That, along with the ability to have buttons that let you quickly respond to notifications, make Watch notifications more like mini interfaces than what we’re used to on our phones,” he says, while admitting that owners will be “more selective about which apps they trust with their wrists”.
Other developers stress the importance of context and relevance for smartwatch notifications.
“The real benefit of smartwatches lies in intelligent services that send data to your watch in the right moment at the right time,” says Benedikt Lehnert, chief design officer at Wunderlist. “We’ve already seen too many apps that overload the user with the same notifications they would get on their phones.”
“The key is delivering the right notification to the right person at the right place at the right time,” adds CNN’s Wellen. “The Apple Watch will be a journey in calibrating the frequency and personalising the content to get the experience just right.”
Apple’s developer kit is ‘underwhelming’
Apple’s software development kit (SDK) for the Apple Watch is, in its current state, very limited. Or rather it places a lot of restrictions in terms of what developers can do with the device including the APIs and data they can access.
“I was personally underwhelmed. It didn’t really add anything to the current offerings,” says mxData’s Chesworth. “Access to some of the key actuators like the heart rate monitor would have been good as well as access to the sensors. It would have opened up to a wider number of applications at launch.”
Most developers agree they’d like to do more with the Apple Watch that its current SDK doesn’t allow, but also say that they understand why the first generation of smartwatches is relatively locked down in this way.
“An open-field for developers could very quickly lead to intrusive applications which really miss the point of the watch as an ambient computing device, something which adds convenience, rather than distraction,” says Stuart Frisby, principal designer at Booking.com.
“If Apple or Google were to give developers unfettered access to everything that the hardware could do, it would likely turn into a chaotic and uneven user experience – one that most users would not want to be part of,” agrees Spooner.
Other developers say they’re relishing the creative restrictions of smartwatches, not just in terms of their SDKs, but their screen sizes and other limitations.
“It’s always fun to have limits. It becomes a little bit of a game in itself, with this tiny screen and the APIs. It reduces what you can do, so you have to innovate in order to understand how to use it to its full extent,” says Jonas Norberg, CEO of DJ app-maker Pacemaker.
‘This matches the early days of iOS’
“Creativity is born out of limitations,” says Spooner. “Rules create a smaller space within which you can experiment, and this means that your constituents (in this case, developers) can create and release apps quicker. The quicker that Apple can get their watch to market with a healthy ecosystem of applications, the more competitive they can be in that marketplace. It’s a pretty smart idea.”
All developers expect the current smartwatch SDKs to evolve, just as the Android and iOS platforms did before them.
“It’s clear that they’re not ready to open up the entire platform, most likely for performance and battery life reasons,” says Circa’s Galliganof Apple.
“But this very much matches the early days of iOS. It’s taken years for iOS to open up to third-party developers a lot of the features that Apple-built apps have had for some time. It’s a great thing that they’re forcing people to think more simply in these early days as it will shape the direction of the platform from here on out.”
Wellen brings it back to users. “It is less about what the watch can do right now and more about what wearers want and need,” he says. Pandora’s Tusman agrees that Apple’s policy “helped us to push our user interface into components that are easily digestible on a very small screen at a glance”.
‘We care more about the type of device people use’
One last aspect to how developers are approaching smartwatches: how do they deal with the different platforms: Android Wear, Apple Watch and Pebble most obviously? Strategies vary, as they do in the smartphone and tablet apps world.
A number of developers stress their multi-platform ambitions. “We’ve put a lot of effort into creating the most comprehensive transport app on Apple Watch. We were also on Wear from day one,” notes Citymapper’s Joe Hughes. “We care more about the type of device people use than who manufactures the devices,” adds Wunderlist’s Benedikt Lehnert.
Evernote’s Hull describes a virtuous cycle whereby the company has brought features that worked well in its Android Wear app to its Apple Watch app, while new features in the latter – a predictive note list and flattened app structure – may transfer back.
“While we don’t have a goal of feature parity across these platforms, we definitely took advantage of our experience building for other watches when designing for the Apple Watch,” she says .
Other developers are focusing their attention on Apple for now. “We’re a really small team, just one developer and one designer, so we really need to focus our efforts on one platform,” says Marthin Freij, mobile and backend developer at Amazing Applications, which makes cookery app Green Kitchen.
Others are developing for Apple Watch first, but with firm plans to use the lessons learned to later port to Android Wear – a pattern familiar from the smartphone and tablet world.
“We’re using the Apple Watch as a starting point, but we’ve got a plan to deal with the entire Android ecosystem as we learn more,” says Epicurious’s Gillin. “We’ll very much use the Apple Watch app as an opportunity to learn what we can do on these super-personal devices,” says Frisby of Booking.com.
‘Our work in Android is probably overdue’
“Apple is our biggest audience to cater for and the fact that there has been reportedly a million pre-orders for the Apple Watch, it far out-stretches Android,” says Sam Rowley, software engineer at mxData.
“We do have prototypes ready to go for Android. Our work in Android is probably overdue. We should have started sooner. The good thing about Apple is that they give the industry a bit of a push. They didn’t invent mobile apps and they didn’t invent the tablet but they did popularise both.”
Developers working across multiple platforms are getting a keen awareness of the differences between them – which is an argument for targeting several as early as possible, perhaps.
“CNN has built a more minimalist notifications experience on Android Wear versus the immersive consumption inside the Samsung Gear S,” says CNN’s Wellen.
“The Apple Watch likely lies somewhere in between, and is a good opportunity for us to nail the ‘glance’ behaviour as well as create a fluid experience between the watch and other devices like your phone or TV.”
“Every operating system has it’s own unique traits – Apple Watch has the hardware digital crown, Android Wear has the integration of Google Voice and Now. It’s important that you think about these experiences, and these users, slightly differently,” says Boone Spooner.
“You wouldn’t want to build an experience that relies on simple hardware scrolling – the digital crown – and then bring that to Android Wear. Your users would be stuck and not understand how they are supposed to navigate.”
What’s encouraging about all this is the thought that’s going in to these early apps for Android Wear, Apple Watch and Pebble, as developers experiment, learn and iterate.
These are the people tasked with answering the big question around smartwatches: why would you want or need one? Based on their answers for this feature, there’s no shortage of effort going in to providing a convincing answer.
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