Three Things I Learned From Wearing a Smart Watch
I stopped wearing a watch while I was in college. A while later, smart watches came along and I was intrigued. I liked the idea of glancing at my watch instead of grabbing my cell phone out of my pocket and then getting distracted. After all, the reason I stopped wearing a watch was because I kept checking the time and people thought I needed to go somewhere instead of being with them. I thought that using my phone so much was even more rude than looking at my watch, so I decided to try wearing a smart watch.
It was about the time that the first Apple Watch was announced that I decided to get a Pebble Time instead. The Pebble Time was a second generation of the most popular smart watch at the time, it cost one fourth as much as an Apple Watch, and it's week-long battery life was in keeping with my philosphy that I should minimize the effort needed to care for my technology.
There were three things I learned pretty quickly:
- Routine and predictablility make for a better user experience
- Gamification can be a strong motivating tactic
- Watches are made to be glanced at, not interacted with
Routine and predictablility make for a better user experience
When I decided to purchase a Pebble Time over an Apple Watch, one of the reasons was that I didn't want to have to charge another device every day. In my experience, it turned out that not making charging my watch a part of my daily routine made it more likely that I'd forget to charge it before the battery ran dead. Eventually, I found myself charging my watch every day just so I wouldn't forget to do it. Once I began charging daily, I never again had my watch battery go dead during an unexpectedly active day. A battery that can last a week doesn't take long to top off when charged daily, so I could easily track both my daily activity and my sleep with my Pebble Time.
Apple actually got battery charging right. The Apple Watch battery was designed for up to two days of use (depending onactivity level) and because of the expectation of daily charging, they were able to better utilize the available battery power using a brighter display and providing more sensors for a more satisfying user experience.
Gamification can be a strong motivating tactic
As a software engineer who sits at a desk all day at work, I know I don't move enough. Add working at home to that, and it's a pretty unhealthy situation.
Before getting a smartwatch, one of the features I was most excited about was monitoring my activity. Immediately after getting my watch, I began walking or jogging every work day. Without that activity, I would rarely exceed 5000 steps in a day, but with a half hour or so of jogging I could get much closer to the 10,000 step goal.
Unfortunately, my eagerness to reach my daily step goal caused me to look at my watch too much and worse, on the Pebble Time I had to make many button pushes to look at the activity statistics. Doing that got old quickly! But, hey, it's a smart watch! Someone must have written an app that would make it so I didn't have to push any buttons, right? Well, most apps and watchfaces available tried to pack so much information on a tiny screen that I had to spend too much time looking at the watch's screen, so I ended up doing what any self-respecting software engineer would do and that was to make my own watchface.
After all that, I realized how inactive I really was and seeing that hard data every day motivated me to get out and get moving! I know not everyone is motivated this way, but a significant number of people are, so I believe the fitness tracking craze has been more beneficial than not. If you need to be more active and are having difficulty just doing it, why not try one of the many affordable fitness trackers on the market? Your body will thank you!
I'm not a gamer. However, turning my health into a game of sorts really helped me to become more active. There are lots of apps in the various app stores that motivate all kinds of behaviors using gamification tactics. I'm not saying I like it, or that it's a good thing, but I am saying gamification does seem to get people to do things. From a developer's perspective gamification can be a way to motivate people to make you more money. From a user's perspective, one should view gamification in unexpected areas with a healthy dose of skepticism. It might be that the app developer is wasting your time for their financial gain. Don't let that happen! But if it is causing you do to do something good for yourself, then maybe you should allow it. Just be aware of why you do things, and whether those things are important to you.
Watches are made to be glanced at, not interacted with
Early on, it seemed that many iOS app developers felt they needed to make a companion app for the Apple watch. Too many of them tried to incorporate as much functionality as possible from the phone app. But my early experience with smart watches taught me that watches are meant for glancing at, and not for interactions using touches and swipes. Providing glanceable information on a watch screen is good. Poking precisely at tiny buttons on the watch screen is not an enjoyable user experience. The key is glanceable. Alerts and notifications, unless they really require an action to follow them (most don't), should dismiss themselves. And developers, please make it easy to minimize the number of notifications that are sent to the watch.
There are two schools of thought on the purpose of a smart watch. One is to make the smart watch a replacement for the cell phone. The other is to use the watch as an accessory to the cell phone with most interactions being with the cell phone. I think this second perspective is the correct one, and I think that was the goal with the Pebble Watch, too. The Apple Watch can be made to go either way. However, the more you do on the watch instead of the cell phone, the more likely you are to drain the watch battery before the day is over. Until the energy density of batteries becomes much greater, completely replacing a cell phone with a watch won't be feasible.
The watch face I made for the pebble was more glanceable than the stock physical activity report, but Apple's rings are as close to perfection as I've seen. On my Pebble watch once the novelty of watching my daily activity wore off, I ended up switching to a watchface that somewhat resembled one of the Apple ring faces and my life was better because of it.
IMHO
The Apple Watch, after many generations of improvements, offers one of the most refined smart watch experiences available. (Yes, I eventually switched to using an Apple Watch.) It has lots of built-in functionality, especially in the health and fitness tracking area. There are many third party apps available for it. Apple makes it relatively painless to customize the notifications the watch delivers. It really is a great user experience, albeit a bit pricey. But for me, the health benefits alone are worth it. It really has changed my life! If you are a fitness enthusiast or not an Apple user, also check out Garmin watches. I don't have any personal experience with them, but I hear they are very good, too!
In wearable tech, keeping it simple is key to the user experience. Developers, please don't make people look at their watches all the time and keep it short when you do. And users, remember that even if technology is your livelihood, your tech isn't your life. I had to learn that at least twice!
What do you think?
Do you prefer to use your phone or your watch to accomplish basic tasks? Let me know in the comments below.