Design 01: Watches in the Wild

Part 1

Last Friday, I set out to discover new ways to innovate the world with the smart watch. Before beginning my research, I thought of different types of people who could benefit from having a hands free device on their wrist versus pulling out their phone. 

Restaurant Owner

The first thing that came to mind was someone who works in the restaurant business. A lot of times, people who deal with food have their hands dirty and can't reach for their phone. However, there is constant information they may want to check on their phone, from simple messages to data that might pertain to customers coming in. To find out if this is true, I visited a local, family owned restaurant here in Berkeley. This is a sandwich restaurant is owned by a really nice couple, and their kids help run the business while attending Cal at the same time. I interviewed the mother, who has been in this type of business her whole life. She does everything from cooking, to serving customers, and planning catering events. 

I asked her about a time that she wanted to find out information from her phone, but wasn't able to. Like I imagined, a lot of times she has her hands dirty when dealing with food but has to pick up a call from a customer, or answer a message from her husband as he is getting more groceries and ingredients. The last example she recalled was when her husband messaged her to ask what else he needed to buy, and she had to stop what she was doing, wash her hands, and then pull out her phone to answer. She normally keeps her cell phone in her back pocket, and there is a landline at their restaurant that he can call as well if necessary but prefers not to keep busy. When I asked her to imagine doing the same task on a smartwatch, the first thing she said she would want is to be able to talk to it. She uses siri very often with her iphone, and doing the same thing using a watch would be very convenient when her hands are tied. For displaying the message, showing the message in full on the watch would be ideal, but when it's too long, she would like to scroll through it by turning her wrist in some way so she doesn't have to get the screen dirty. 

This was all very interesting, but functionality that the makers of the watch usually have to handle. I asked her to recall another experience, and she said that a lot of times she needs to get invoices for customers. If she is busy with something else, it takes a lot of time to go upstairs to her computer, and look up the invoices for different large orders when a customer comes in. This isn't so much an inconvenience with a smart phone, but still something that would be made significantly more convenient if she could get this information directly to her wrist. When asked how she would interact with something like this, she said it would be great to simply ask her watch in "siri" like fashion for an invoice for a specific customer by name. If it could then sync with her email or her computer to fetch this information and display the amount for quick viewing, it would save her a lot of time when she tries to deal with invoices as other customers are buying food. All she would need to see is the name of the customer to make sure it fetched the right person, and the amount that they need to pay so that they can write the check on the spot. I think that this idea has a lot of potential for helping small businesses who are trying to do so many things at once and don't have people who specialize in only one task. 

Police Officer

The second idea that came to mind as I was thinking of people who could benefit from smart watches are police officers. I imagined that very often officers have their hands tied with different things, or want to have their hands free in case something happens, but at the same time they are dealing with communication and other things that require them to use their hands. I went over to the UCPD building, and on the way found an officer sitting in his car so of course I bothered him! This officer was in his late 50s, and has worked for the police force for many years.

I asked the officer to think of a time in which he had to pull out his phone when it was not very convenient. He often keeps his phone in his right pants pocket, and if he is wearing his other uniform, in the pocket of his shirt. One of the tasks that is most frustrating for cops, is making sure they are referencing the correct codes with they are dealing with suspects, writing tickets, or any other task that requires the to know different laws and codes. Police officers often don't know all of the codes by heart, and need to make sure they are correctly referencing them. In order to do so, many cops will pull out their phone, and look up the correct codes online on the internet. This is a long and tedious process, and the worst part is that they are usually doing this at a time when they need their hands free to deal with someone that just broke a law. Sometimes, the officer told me, you can tell by different body movements or facial expressions that a person may soon get violent. At a time like this it is the most difficult to deal with such an issue using a cell phone, because if they run off or fight back the officer becomes more vulnerable. 

I asked the officer to imagine how he might used a smartwatch to get the information that he needs. He pulled up his wrist, spoke into it and said "Get me the code for..." Lots of times he will know the general information associated with a specific law, but wants to be sure he knows all of the information. By saying what the law is at a very basic level, the watch should guess which code he is referring to and then show it in a short summary. Then, he said, if he confirms that it's displaying the correct code, he can click to have it send to his phone in more detail. The reason for this is that reading such a dense text on a smartwatch would be hard to do. 

Part 1 Summary

The research phase of going out and talking to strangers from different industries was a great learning experience. There are so many things out here that people want to use, but we don't know about their ideas because they are so specific. I would never have thought of building an application that fetches invoices for customers, or one that looks up certain codes for officers as they are dealing with people who break the law. There is still so much innovation that can be done, and it can be found with a bit of research. 

One pattern that I noticed among both people, although their different background, is how they imagine themselves using the watch. Both wanted to do it by voice, because it is quicker, easier, and fully allows them to make it a hands free experience.

Part 2

For this phase, I brainstormed several ideas. Some of these built off of my research from last friday with the restaurant owner and police officer, and others are just cool ideas that came to mind or that came up as I was discussing this project with some friends and house mates.

- Fetch food order invoices from computer

- Access emails across all accounts by voice

- Integrate all notifications in a restaurant (microwave, oven, toaster, temperature reached, other timers and indicators) with a smartwatch for notifications when away from the kitchen

- Get a detailed code by describing the law broken

- Walkie talkie-like application for groups of people

- When two people shake hands with smartwatches, exchange information (after both accept)

- Project power and speed of a golf/tennis/baseball swing

- measure distance ran and speed while running

- measure distance swam and speed for swimmers (I would definitely use this)

- monitor hours of sleep, and wake up at best time in the sleep cycle within a certain window

- score keeper for all sorts of games and sports, simply tap twice to represent a new point

- control music in a car through voice

- step by step recipe application that tells you what to do next as you cook (don't need to use book and get it dirty, or open on a larger device that you need to touch)

The idea that I decided to prototype is the app for officers to look up codes. I chose this because it is something I never would have thought of on my own, and something I think is really necessary. The market for of officers is quite big, but it is not tapped into as much as many other markets. An application that solves the issue of looking up codes on the internet in a convenient fashion, as the officer stated, would help officers a lot and save them time and personal risk. 

For my watch, I wanted to keep it round for aesthetic purposes, but also allow it to have detachable layers for different screens within the application. I created watch using a ring of cardboard on top of a circle of cardboard, stapling only the top and bottom to allow for easy sliding of papers in and out of the watch. The strap, made out of a paper bag, allowed for flexibility to fit any hand.

The first screen is simply the icon for the application. Then, when the user opens it, a screen shows up that allows the user to speak into the microphone saying the information for the code that her or she is looking for. A loading screen let's the user know that the information is being retrieved. Then codes appear in a list that are the most relevant to the information provided by the officer. The user can scroll through until the summary seems to reflect the desired code, and it can be selected to be sent to the phone in more detail. Behind these screens were a few more white papers, which would allow me to draw other screens on the spot if necessary.

In order to test this, I went down to the UCPD building again to try and look for an officer to use my smartwatch. Unfortunately no one was available, but right as I was stepping out, the same officer from Friday pulled in and was more than willing to see what I had built! We talked about the topic one more time, and I asked him to use the application. He know what the application was for since we had spoken before, but I did not tell him how it would run. He began by tapping the icon to the application, leading to the listening screen. He asked "What should I do now?" I told him to simply do what seems necessary based on the screen. He then talked to the watch, and I switched to the loading screen and then the code list view. He swiped to the left, even though the arrow at the bottom was pointing down. I switched it to the next screen anyway, at which point he started scrolling more (but there were no more codes). He then selected the code, which led to the "send to phone" screen, where he accepted and the process was finished. 

After doing this, he said that he would like to see another summery on the watch before sending to the phone because the phone is really inconvenient. So instead of writing a summery in a sentence or two, and then sending a very detailed summary to the phone, it would be nice to go from the short summary to another more detailed summary on the watch that covers most of the important information. Only if the officer feels this is not enough, should he have the option to send it to the phone, but it will most often not be necessary because officers know the "gist" of the code and simply wants a refresher on the main points. This brought him to one last thing which he considered the most important. Since officers generally know the code, the summary doesn't need to be too extensive, but many times they don't remember the code number and that is the key piece of information. For example, just last week he saw someone blocking an intersection, and knows that the name of the law being broken is "anti gridlock," but for the ticket he needed the code number which he did not remember. This led him to look for the code online on his phone, and then look through his handbook which takes a very long time. 

If he was able to simply say "anti gridlock" into the watch, or "blocking an intersection" if he did not know the name, and in return get the code number, that is all he would need in that specific case. 

Conclusion

I learned several things from the prototyping phase:

- sometimes people don't know exactly what they want until they begin to use something. They will have a set of criteria, and think they want it done a certain way, but when you put the device in front of them they will realize a better way to interact with it. 

- using a prototype, even one that doesn't really function, allows you to see how a user imagines him or herself using a device. This can help find flaws in design and improvements that can be made at an early stage

- very low-fi prototypes are not as great at assessing usability because there are awkward pauses between screens within the application

- having a physical prototype, even when the thing being tested is an application for this physical device, is very beneficial in learning how a user might physically interact with an application. This is especially important with a watch when a lot of the benefits involve hands free interaction

- it is important to make the design mocks very neat and legible to allow for smooth transitioning, even with a first prototype, and especially with users who may have difficulty with their vision. 

It was really cool to go up to strangers and ask them all of these questions, because I not only learned how to improve the process of researching an idea, but I learned that there are lots of cool ways to innovate such specific industries that I would never even think of myself.