Design 01

Users

The first target users I interviewed were George and Nancy Daniels, the owners of Tivoli Caffe on Bancroft. Operating a family-run cafe since 2010, their jobs involve a lot of different roles, from customer interaction, sales, inventory management, to -- of course -- baking. This, however, leaves them with less time to stay in touch with their family of 6 spread across different locations. Fortunately for them, 3 of their children presently attend Cal and work in the cafe part-time, but one is studying for a JD/MD at Stanford. They hadn't given smartwatches much thought, but did wear regular watches and would appreciate ways to streamline or automate their work. I could immediately see how busy any work day was -- even at 4pm in the afternoon, they were doing all sorts of tasks while talking to me. They had to step out for a delivery before I could grab a picture.

The second target user was Angel, a part-time worker at Bancroft Clothing Company. After graduating from a local high school, Angel eschewed college in favor of directly joining the workforce. Working 5 days a week (but rarely the same 5 days), she enjoys filling a variety of different capacities. As an iOS user who tried and rejected Android, she didn't see much use in having a smartwatch at all. However, she did mention some common problems the store faces -- an inflexibility of workers to handle busy seasons. Bancroft Clothing company, as a seller of Cal gear, tends to be highly seasonal in its traffic; football games and graduation ceremonies draw many more customers than the 23rd day of school. Some way to streamline customer checkout, or to quickly increase cashier availability in response to long lines, might help with this issue.

Brainstorming

Smartwatches have an advantage of phones for operations that last seconds, when it's a waste to go through the trouble of pulling out your phone. They suffer from the disadvantage of being smaller for viewing and interaction.

1. Help load balancing from a human scale by allowing users to press on their watches to request assistance or check out. If waiters/cashiers/checks have phones too, they might be notified quickly to end their interaction without needing to pull out their phone in front of a customer.
2. Sending money, whether to friends or merchants. Phone payment hasn't yet taken off, but carrying around many different kinds of credit cards and cash can get annoying for customers, especially as different stores have different policies for each.
3. Getting discounts by QR code/NFC or pushed notifications when you pass by a store with an ongoing promotion. QR codes never really took off because of the silliness involved in pulling out your phone, swiping through a few screens to get to the reader app.
4. When I check my alarm in the morning, it could keep on buzzing me until I tell it to shut up
5. Monitor sleeping patterns while attached to your wrist at night, and let you know whether you need to get more or less sleep
6. During the day, it can act as a stress analyzer, alerts you when heartbeat is too high. Something similar might work as a lie detector
   
7. It can remind you to get out of your seat and drink water, or do a few jumping jacks every so often, just to improve your posture
8. USB flash drive of the future- wireless file transfers, simplified by swiping files onto and off of your watch.
   
9. Quick-access flashlight -- so many people use their phones as a really bad substitute anyways
   
10. Danger alert -- quickly notify police, buzz molesters, 
11. Nonverbal communication in different situations. For example, if it's really loud in a concert and I want to let my friend know that I'm grabbing a snack. Or if it's a meeting and I want to share something with the person sitting next to me.
12. Push long notifications or content (e.g. emails, pdfs) onto mobile phone or laptop. Essentially, sending context to the next device you interact with so you can seamlessly transition from getting notified to interacting with it on another device.

Prototyping

I ended up prototyping the nonverbal communication app. In a lot of situations, I thought that the ability to tell something to the people around me very quickly with a smartwatch would be helpful. The design is pretty simple, in accordance with the constraints of a smartwatch. The main interface for the user is essentially a predefined list of messages they can scroll through, to select the one they want to display. Once selected, the message will display upside down, so it would be convenient for you to hold out your hand and show it. It would also vibrate, so you could press it against the person you wanted to communicate with to get their attention.

I tested this prototype with a user, William Xu. Observations:

• I expected him to swipe to see the other messages first, but he immediately tapped on the center, so I skipped to directly going into display mode.
  
• He wanted a way to switch between loud and quiet mode -- at a concert, for example, the screen might want to be flashing colors, but in a meeting he'd want it to be more reserved.
• He wasn't sold on the vibration feature -- tapping on someone's shoulder is probably a more socially accepted gesture than pressing a vibrating watch into them.
• It wasn't obvious to him how to turn off display mode
• The app seemed a little bit too simple for him to justify downloading on a watch, if he owned one; he would want more functionality.