Part 1: Interviews
The first person I talked to was a family friend. He is an accountant by title, but he describes his work as mostly sales. He’s in his 50s and commutes to SF from Oakland every day for work. He doesn’t really use his phone very much besides for email/text/phone, and occasional browsing. His main complaint with his phone was text size and readability, since he has really bad eyes. All text on his phone shows up at 150% thanks to the accessibility features on iPhone, and he uses the magnifier app occasionally to help read articles. He was very apprehensive about using a smart watch to replace some of the functionality of his phone, due to the small screen size; however, when I suggested other input/output methods, he mentioned that for short emails and text messages, voice input/output would work well, although he would prefer not to use it to read or compose longer emails. He made an interesting suggestion that audio output would work if it could summarize long emails/articles to get the gist of what someone sent, although actual response would likely be drafted on a computer. Some other things we talked about were text input methods, a stocks application, and turn-by-turn directions.
The second person I talked to was a 25 year old bike technician/bike enthusiast at Missing Link on Shattuck. He already knew a little about smart watches, and had a lot of feedback for how he’d want to use one. He complained that it was difficult to check his phone while riding his bike, and that he’d always end up having to ignore phone calls and text messages because it was infeasible to respond to them. He said that for texts, it’d be really nice to have a watch that vibrated when you got a message, and you could see the text message on the watch screen. He noted that vibration was probably the best way to notify a bike rider, since it can be difficult to hear sounds. With regards to text input, he suggested the T9 keypad idea from the “dumbphone” era, and we bantered a little bit about how good we were at typing with it. He emphasized that he shouldn’t have to look at the watch to input text. He was also open to voice input, which might be easier, but he was worried about the battery drain. We also talked about a bike-oriented directions application. He said that a lot of the features that appear in Google Maps or similar apps have far too much information: he’d just want something that spoke the current direction. He wanted it to simply be an icon on the watchface, and basically just run in the background. If you double-tapped the icon, it would open a list of directions.
In general, this guy was really focused on two notions: the watch should not be tethered to the phone (it should be a minimalist replacement), and the watch needs to have extremely good battery life. He said that a decent amount of the functionality we went over is in phones, or could be in phones; however, phones do too much and it causes them to run out of battery. He wanted the watch to be minimalist and utilitarian.
Summary
From these two interviewers, I noticed that people are not ready to see the smart watch as an addendum to the phone; rather, they want the watch to be more of a low-fi replacement for the phone. Important concerns are battery life, accessibility and legibility, and good input methods.
Part 2: Prototyping and Evaluation
I used a lot of the input from my interviewees to generate a list of 13 potential ideas.
- Maps/directions: an application that mostly runs in the background and just tells you where to turn ahead of time. When you open the icon, it displays a list of directions to get there.
- Stocks: user selects which stocks they’re interested in, and a way to notify if the stock performance is “interesting”. When app is opened by default, only shows users the “interesting” ones, to minimize the amount of information they see.
- Text input mechanism: T9 keypad with Swype-style functionality.
- Stumbleupon/Yelp app: shows you random interesting places around the area that you are in.
- Availability: Set your availability as free or not free. User can view friends who are free, and message all of them at once to set up plans. User can also categorize friends into groups.
- Pandora-esque Music application: works with Bluetooth headphones, plays songs from pre-specified genres, swipe left to pick a new song and not play more songs like that, swipe right to continue finding similar music
- Text shortener: displays compressed versions of text for fast viewing. Could integrate with a news application but would be nice for long emails too
- Contact info exchanging app: (a wonderful idea from some guy in class) Exchange contact information (or maybe add each other on LinkedIn) when you shake someone’s hand
- Task/calendar: watch gives you notifications about tasks and calendar events; to add tasks, you can drag the watch/minute hand to set time, and pick a day from a calendar page.
- Strava: add all the functionality of the Strava app for bike ride statistics into the watch, so cyclists don’t need to carry a bike computer around (2nd interviewee told me this is actually a thing?!)
- Key integration: (although this requires additional hardware) tap watchface on a supported lock to unlock doors without having to carry around keys
- Yelp: Automatically check you into a place based on your GPS location.
- House lighting: watch communicates with lights such that when you walk in a room the lights will turn on.
From this list of ideas, I ended up choosing the cyclist-oriented maps app to prototype.
I drew out all the screens I felt that users should see when using the maps application. I had a couple of important interactions (namely, vibration and voice output of directions), but I chose to tell the test subject about this only if he made a complaint. The workflow shown above goes from the home screen, to the apps drawer, to selecting a type of transit and destination, to displaying directions and opening a widget on the home screen. I wanted this to be intuitive and easy to use.
Feedback
I asked my friend Brian to help me test out this prototype. Brian bikes a lot, and commuted to Emeryville every day this summer for work via bike, so I felt that he would have a lot of good input for me.
Brian was able to navigate the screens quite well, also noticing that the destination input was a voice input (thanks Google icon standardization!). He also complained about the directions list, which allowed me to explain the vibration and direction vocalization features; in case its unclear, the watch will vibrate and speak directions out loud before the direction is meant to be performed ala Google Maps. There were a couple interesting things he noted though (solutions in italics)
- The directions list is hard to read at a quick glance. Highlight/use big font for the current direction, and make the next direction a little smaller. Show only two directions.
- The transition from the directions list to the home screen widget page is unclear. Incorporate swipe gesture/icon so you can swipe to the home screen.
- There's no way to change an input once you've made it. Swipe left from directions page to re-enter input (basically use swiping functionality to transition between screens, similar to #2
- How to stop navigation, or exit the app? Include a button on the home screen and directions page which allows you to stop navigation<
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