Before beginning this project I researched the design guidelines/principles of both Apple and Samsung smartwatches as they are the most popular companies for buying smartwatches.
What Are the Top 11 Smartwatch Companies? A Comparative Global Market Overview - “Apple and Samsung dominate the premium and ecosystem-led smartwatch segments, accounting for the majority of global market value.”
Designing for watchOS | Apple Developer Documentation
Design principles | Wear | Android Developers
Some of the key points from both of these were:
Keep things simple, only have an app focus on a couple tasks or functions.
Have any tasks that the app be quick to accomplish.
Most apps and functions that smartwatch apps provide are personalised to the user i.e. Wellbeing apps, health apps and location or time based app/function.
Most apps on smartwatches provide the user quick and relevant notifications to convey information quickly.
Make all information displayed easy to read at a glance.
Have any app available on a smartwatch be functional on its own, even if its connected to another app on a separate device.
Have most of the content being displayed focus in the centre of the screen, to ensure that all the information is available.
I then looked at the apps available for both Samsung and Apple smartwatches, they both had pretty similar apps available with most of them being automatically installed on every watch. Most of these apps are focused around fitness/health, with the main ones being an activity/steps tracker, a heart rate monitor, a sleep tracker. Both watches also featured a map app to allow to user to check their location. They also both obviously include apps related to time with alarms, timers, stopwatches and just generally telling the time.
Most of the apps on the smartwatches conveyed its information though colour and icons rather than focusing on text, although some text is necessary. On one individual app there could be a range of colours used with most apps using between 1-3 different colours to avoid making the design too busy. Most of the apps keep their layouts from being too busy by having the content spread across multiple pages that the user can scroll through, this also helps to organised the content efficiently so the user can quickly find what information they are looking for.
My initial idea was to create a map centred app which would alert a user when an place/location they might be interested in visiting is nearby.
After our lecture in week 1 where we experimented with creating less common connections and ideas I decided to switch my plan for this project to follow an idea that I came up with during this. So instead I want to create an app to keep track of progress and deadlines, which can alert the user when a deadline is coming up soon. I would still like to create a quick prototype of my original idea eventually as I still think it would make an interesting app for a smartwatch to have, but i’ll create this in my own time as it will not be my focus for this project.
I created these initial sketches during my workshop in week 1 that I would like to expand upon and refine more.