DESIGN 01: Watches in the Wild

INTERVIEWS

I targeted people who already used smartphones because I wanted to learn how interactions with a smartphone could be simplified by using smart watches. I did not limit my target to people with a specific demographic other than “non college students” since I wanted to make a smart watch app for technology users in general.

First interview

I interviewed a woman in her 30s in front of Original Pollo restaurant at Shattuck Avenue. She described how she often wanted to see messages on her phone while she was walking. When this situation occurred, she walked to the side and stopped walking in order to see her phone. She considered it impolite to read messages on her phone in the middle of walking, and that’s why she stopped walking just to see her phone. Then, she remembered how she felt uncomfortable using GPS while walking because as she already mentioned, she thought it is impolite to see her phone while walking. This surprised me, as I never thought walking while looking at a phone is impolite. She keeps her phone inside her bag. When she wanted to read a message in the middle of walking, she stepped aside, opened her bag, grabbed her phone, unlocked the phone, opened the messaging app, read the message, locked the phone, put the phone back in her bag, and continued walking. Then, we discussed about smart watches. She said that she would not feel comfortable reading a message on the watch while walking because of the politeness reason. It would be the same as reading on a phone, except this one would be on a watch. Then, I asked about the possibility of using a Bluetooth earphone and let the computer read the message to her via the Bluetooth earphone. She said it would be better that way. She also mentioned that she is concerned with the burden of bringing more devices. She refused to take a picture with me.

I learned two important things from this interview. First, people may dislike the idea of reading a message while walking, doesn't matter if it's on a watch or on a phone. We need to come up with a better solution for walking commuters that will allow them to walk without reading on their device. Secondly, people may want to keep as few devices as possible, which means that the smart watch must be designed in a way that allows people to feel “natural” to have it on their wrist so that it does not count as another burdening electronic device (for example, it has to be lightweight and very convenient to maintain).

Second interview

I interviewed a woman in her late 20s in front of Starbucks at Oxford Street. She had a hard time remembering a situation where she wanted to do something on her phone but her phone was not in her hands. After I mentioned some examples, she said that she often feels lazy to pick up a phone call if her phone is 20 feet away. After discussing about smart watches, she wanted to be able to answer phone calls using a smart watch. She wanted to be able to talk to the watch.

From this interview, I learned that smart watches could solve the problem of people being lazy to grab their phone, even if the phone is only 20 feet away. In other words, smart watches can provide convenience to people by substituting the applications of a phone. Unfortunately, that is the only lesson I learned from this interview, as I was unable to make her come up with a another situation.

Third Interview

I interviewed a woman also in her late 20s in front of the same Starbucks. The first thing that she mentioned was also about the laziness of grabbing her phone if her phone was not within her reach, especially if she was downstairs and her phone was charging upstairs. Sometimes she missed phone calls or messages in this situation. After further discussion, she described her experience using a smartphone when cooking at home to read/reply messages, watch cooking instructions on YouTube, set timers, and convert units. When her hands were messy, it was annoying for her because she would have to clean her hands first to do these things on her phone. She said that using a smart watch could be a lot more convenient to do these tasks. I asked her in particular about how she would want the interaction to be like when converting units using a smart watch. She said that both voice input and touch would be okay. If using touch, she wanted to use just one finger, like her pinkie finger, because usually her pinkie finger was less dirty. Finally, she said that she wanted all iPhone basic features/apps to be available on the smart watch.

I learned from this interview that smart watch could have many useful applications in cooking. Unlike professional chefs, ordinary people use assistance from their smartphone to convert units, set timers, and watch cooking tutorials. I also learned that we must be careful when designing the interaction for people who are cooking, as their hands are often dirty. This means that the application must be easy to use with minimum number of touches or using voice input.

Common Pattern

In all of these interviews, when I asked them to remember a situation where they wanted to do something on their phone but their phone was not in their hands, the first thing that came to their mind was always related to phone calls or messaging. It means that smart watch has a huge potential in addressing this situation. Therefore, smart watches must be designed in a way that will make answering phone calls or reading/replying messages easy to accomplish when a smartphone is not in the user’s hand.

BRAINSTORMING

Below are my 12 ideas. Many of these ideas require text inputs. Due to the small smart watch screen, I propose two methods for text inputs: voice or gesture writing (for example, write the letter 'a' on the screen to type 'a'). This will be mentioned in many of my ideas below.

1. Phone App: an app that allows you to answer or make phone calls on your smart watch. The watch should have a speaker and a microphone or be paired with a Bluetooth headset to facilitate phone calling. When there is an incoming call, you can swipe right to accept or left to decline. To make a phone call, you can press the call button, then swipe through your contact list or say whom you want to call. This is a popular demand learned from my interviews.
   
2. Messaging App: an app that allows you to read or reply messages on your smart watch. To send a message, you can select a contact, and then you can say your message or enter it using gesture. You can read using incoming messages on your smart watch, swipe up and down to read the contents, or let your smart watch read it out loud to you. This is a popular demand learned from my interviews.
   
3. Charging Mode: turns your smart watch into an additional battery for your phone. This mode turns the smart watch into sleep mode and directs its power to an external cable. This allows you to charge your phone anywhere and avoid situations where you have to be separated from your phone because it has to be charging near a power outlet like my third interviewee.
   
4. WatchTube: an app to stream videos from YouTube or other streaming sites on your smart watch. You can use voice input or gesture writing to search videos, and then use simple swipe and touch gestures to navigate through videos and control the playing video. For example, swipe left to pause, swipe right to play, and swipe down to stop.
   
5. Converter: an app that allows you to convert units on your smart watch. You can say what you want to convert or enter it using touch (first select the base unit, and then enter the number you want to convert). The output can be displayed on your smart watch screen and read out loud to you at the same time. Especially useful for casual cooks to convert units in the middle of cooking.
   
6. Timer: an app that allows you to set a timer by simple gestures (swiping to increase or decrease time) or voice command. The timer can be stopped by a swipe gesture. Useful for casual cooks, as mentioned by my third interviewee.
   
7. Find Your Phone: an app on your smart watch that makes your smartphone rings so that you can find it. Simply tap a button to ring your smartphone. This idea is inspired by my third interviewee who mentioned about her phone being upstairs when she was downstairs. This app can help in case you don’t know where your phone is in your house.
   
8. GPS: an app that helps you to reach your destination by providing turn-by-turn navigation on your smart watch. You can enter the destination address by voice or gesture writing. The screen should then display a small map, the next turn that you have to make, and a button to exit the navigation. This app is especially useful for walking navigation, since continuously holding your phone while walking is inconvenient as mentioned by my first interviewee.
9. Recipe: an app to find and show recipes. As mentioned by my third interviewee, interacting with a smartphone when cooking is troublesome. You can say the recipe that you want to find or type it using gesture writing, swipe through the found recipes, and choose one recipe to display. You can then use just one finger to slide the recipe up and down to see the contents, or swipe left to go back.
10. Sara: a voice command app that allows you to tell your watch to do all kinds of basic stuff (just like Siri in iOS devices). You can make a phone call, send a message, set a timer, convert units, or etc. by tapping a button and saying the command to your watch. Your watch will then display and say the result or take actions based on your command.
    
11. Member Cards: an app that allows you to show your membership barcode on your smart watch to be scanned. When I was interviewing people near Starbucks, I saw some people grabbing their smartphone from their pocket to pay their Starbucks. This app would allow them to show the QR code on their watch instead. Simply open the app, swipe through your membership cards, and choose one to show. You would need to enter the card information first by typing the required information on your watch using gesture writing or entering those information using your phone.
    
12. Camera: an app that allows you to take a picture or record a video using your smart watch. You can swipe to switch between photo and recording mode, and tap the screen to take the shot. This is useful when taking a shot using your smartphone is difficult such as when you are cooking, as mentioned by my third interviewee.
    

My favorite idea is idea number 10 (Sara) because it would be a very easy-to-use app that would solve all of common problems, including those that were expressed by my three interviewees.

PROTOTYPING SARA

The goal of this app is to enable user to do all essential activities by voice. I made the screen to show only one button to ensure the simplicity of this app. The interaction results are displayed with a large font and also read out loud to deliver the information efficiently to the user.

The picture above contains example screens for my smart watch app. The first button that appears when opening my app is a button with microphone icon (1). When the user taps this button, the app will start listening to the user’s voice. These are some examples of possible interactions:

• The user can say a command to send a message to someone. The app will show the message and read it out loud before sending it to confirm its correctness (2).
• The user can say a command to convert units. The app will show the result and read it out loud (3).
• The user can set a timer. The app will set the timer and display the remaining time (4). The timer will continue in background if the user does another interaction.
• At any point, a phone call can interrupt the app (5).

The screen can be tapped at any time to input new commands.

The picture above shows what I used to demonstrate a scroll view. The paper can be scrolled up and down to see the message contents (assume that the paper outside the watch frame is invisible).

TESTING SARA

I tested my prototype with a user who had experienced the trouble of getting his phone to perform basic tasks. He also likes to cook, and he utilizes his phone a lot to help him cook.

First, I let him wear my prototype. As shown above, the screen shows a microphone button. I told him that after tapping that button he could say various commands to the smart watch. I let him choose what he wanted to say.

He said he wanted to read new messages. As shown above, I gave him the message view screen, and I told him to pretend the paper outside the frame was invisible and he could scroll the paper up and down.

Then, I told him the possible applications in cooking. I told him to imagine that he was cooking with wearing the smart watch. He tried the unit conversion feature to convert a cup to tablespoons. As shown above, I gave him the unit conversion result.

FEEDBACK

My tester shared four feedbacks:

1. He didn’t like the idea of tapping before saying a command. He said it would be better to use voice to start a command, such as what Google did with their voice command system, which must be started with “Ok Google”.
   
2. He thought that it was unclear what to do if he wanted to close the result screen. For example, when the unit conversion result was shown, he said it was unclear what the user could do next, since there was no button or any clue for next interaction. He knew that he could tap the screen again to begin a new command because I told him.
   
3. He thought that voice recognition in general is problematic especially for people with accents, so relying so much on voice might be bad.
   
4. He was concerned if he didn’t have Internet access and wanted to use this app in the middle of cooking or another activity. He assumed that the voice command system would require Internet access, so without Internet access the app would be useless.
   

INSIGHTS

1. My tester is probably right about not having a button to start the voice command. If I reflect back to my third interviewee, she also mentioned about dirty hands when cooking and preferring voice over touch. Using a start phrase like “Hey Sara” to start a command would be a good idea for the next revision.
2. In my current prototype, it is not clear to the user when they can start a new command. I need to ensure that the user know they can start a new command at anytime after a command has finished executing (for example, when the screen is showing the unit conversion result, the user can start a new command by tapping the screen again although there is no button there). This can be made clear by showing a small text stating such information or having the app to say it out loud after saying the result. The drawback of showing a text is that it takes some space.

3. Relying so much on speech recognition might be dangerous. The main purpose of having a smart watch is to make interactions more convenient. If speech recognition makes interactions more difficult for some people with accents, then this app fails to make more convenient interactions. We need to develop a better speech recognition system or a simple GUI alternative for Sara.

4. If the speech recognition uses Internet to outsource the heavy computation to an online server, it will allow more complicated heave computations with minimum use of battery power. However, this is terrible when there is no Internet connection, as Sara will be completely useless. Another alternative is to do the speech recognition on the smartphone or on the smart watch, but this will consume battery power and it will not allow more sophisticated computations due to the limited processing power.

5. Before I said anything, my tester already mentioned that the microphone icon that I drew must be for speech recognition. It is interesting how people developed a culture that connects microphone icon with speech recognition.

From this experience, I can see that there are many possibilities to improve this very simple app. The way to enter commands or show information can definitely be improved by allowing the user to start the command using voice and making sure that the user knows how to start another command.

Thank you for reading my project!