“I’ve spent the better part of the last year and a half building different apps on the Apple Watch, ranging from fitness trackers to news readers and collaboration tools,” Conrad Stoll blogs. “I really enjoyed speaking on a design focused panel and wanted to continue the conversation by sharing some of my thoughts here on what works and what doesn’t when it comes to smartwatch UX.”
“The Apple Watch is both a blessing and a curse for designers. It has a very small screen that provides natural constraints for what you place inside of it. The watch invites simplicity, and welcomes a minimal approach to app design. But it is also very easy to overthink your design and create a complex and confusing user experience,” Stoll writes. “One of the reasons people complain that the Apple Watch is too slow and that apps on the watch aren’t great is that many of them are trying to do too much.”
“When it’s time to gather around a whiteboard and start designing your Apple Watch app, draw all of your features and start discussing some of your least obvious ones,” Stoll writes. “It’s very likely that one of them represents a better use case for the watch. If you start with the secondary features you might realize that focusing there can actually improve the utility of your overall product.”
Read more in the full article – recommended for both Apple Watch users and developers – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple Watch apps are getting better as the devleopers live with Apple Watch and their apps. Some standouts include big names like MLB At Bat, Fox News, and most of Apple’s apps.
I’m probably an outlier, but I just don’t use that many apps on my iPhone, maybe 16-20 consistently (counting the stock Apple apps). Thus on my Watch I don’t even use any 3rd party apps (besides receiving FB messages). The ones I’ve tried offer less functionality than their counterparts on the iPhone.
Time, weather, activity and notifications are the killer apps. Until the 3rd-party Watch apps offer a dramatically faster or more unique user experience, it’ll be tough to convince people to use them, let alone pay for them.