Watches in the Wild

Interviews

In order to determine what users want in a smart watch, I met with some successful adults to figure out what was wanted by the modern-day businessman.

Interviewee #1 - Alex Soriano: Portfolio Director for Cardiac Device Research at St Jude’s Medical

Interviewee #2 - Marc Perline: Vice President of Store Operations at Daniel’s Jewelers

The main theme that I wanted to stay consistent between interviews was the interviewees being successful, middle-aged executives. In my opinion, this is the demographic that is most likely to participate in the smart watch market: people with little time on their hands, extra money to spend, in need of streamlining their most-used applications.

From this data, I was able brainstorm 12 ideas as potential smart watch applications:

1. Email watch display interface
   
2. Check to see who's calling you on your watch screen before having to dig out your phone
   
3. Get voicemail translated to text and show up on your watch
   
4. Listening to voicemail immediately from your smart watch
   
5. Googling information with via voice-recognition
   
6. Changing your music on Spotify/iTunes
   
7. Create a programmable “favorites” interface for side-buttons.<
   >
8. GPS app that allows you to find your car
   
9. Control your TV from your watch
10. Start your car via your watch
11. Control your house's AC from your watch
12. Control your garage door via watch

I ended up choosing a "favorites interface for the watch's side buttons" because I feel that it's a smart and very powerful way to streamline the speed of reaching the watch's main features.

After developing a rapid prototype made out of my roommate's actual watch, and a collection of paper screens, I was able to test the product with a user, my neighbor, an adult male who works at a San Francisco tech company, using the power of imagination.

The prototype is basically my roommate's real watch, paired with a set of square pieces of paper with a pencil-drawn interface on each square.  The interface has 4 buttons (2 on the left and right side, respectively) on the sides of the watch.  The demonstration starts with me asking the user what the four most used apps on their smart phone is, quickly draw a small interface for each application, and then tell the user to press one of the side buttons.  Each button press is mapped to a different one of their favorite applications, and after a button press, I switch the current screen out with the screen of the corresponding app.

Here are some insights gained from user-testing:

• Tapping buttons is simple which is great.
• Definitely would want to manually set the 4 apps that map to each button press.
• Screen size should be square, and 2.5 inch by 2.5 inch.
• Screen Size is too small for messaging apps, so it would need to have a great speech-to-text system.