Design 01: Watches in the Wild

Interviewing

Interviewee 1: Danitza Mayoral

Interviewee Profile

• Age: 32
• Occupation: School Staff
• Mobile technology: iPhone 6
• Interview date: Sep 1, 2015
• Smartwatch owner: No

Q&A

All answers are paraphrased to reduce verbosity.

• Q: What kind of role does your mobile phone play in your life?
• A: "I use my iPhone all the time, it's replaced so many things in my life. I use it to take pictures at my work, to check on my friends on Facebook, and respond to emails. I use my phone to keep close tabs on my family, especially the ones with health conditions. I want to be able to receive updates if anything happens."

• Q: When's the last time you wanted to do something on your phone but forgot it at home? What were you trying to accomplish?
• A: "I went on a field trip once with students and I forgot my phone in the car. It was a rather uneasy experience because I thought the students' parents might call, or my family members might have an emergency. Basically, I wanted to stay in touch with them and be reachable."

• Q: Where do you typically keep your phone?
• A: "I keep it in my pocket if there is one, otherwise in my purse."

• Q: What if you could do that on your wrist without your phone, how would you want to perform the task?
• A: "I know most smartwatches already kind of do this, but what I really want is to be able to receive social network updates from the people I care about. For example, maybe Facebook should alert me if a friend of mine posted a status about, let's say, her week being depressing, it'd be great for my watch to alert me on that so I can either go to a computer or use my phone to reach out and help her feel better or something. Since I definitely don't want every single status update to show up on my watch, I think if the watch were able to be smart enough to figure out what you care about, that'll be something I'd use it for."

Summary

Danitza wants to have the watch help her filter her social network for important updates that she cares about.

Interviewee 2: David Jacknin

Interviewee Profile

• Age: 55
• Occupation: Part-Time Writer, Photographer, Substitute Teacher
• Mobile technology: Motorola Moto E
• Interview date: Sep 9, 2015
• Smartwatch owner: No

Q&A

All answers are paraphrased to reduce verbosity.

• Q: What kind of role does your mobile phone play in your life?
• A: "I hate how technology takes away a lot of the people-to-people interactions we used to have, so my phone plays a very moderate role in my life. I use my phone mostly to check on the stock market and to send and receive messages from my family members. Occasionally, I go to news sites as well. Facebook crashes on my phone for some reason, but it worked I'd check Facebook sometimes as well. It doesn't bother me as much though, since I can talk to and text people just fine without Facebook. I used to operate an ad agency, so if I were still doing that, I'd probably use it to check up work progress, business updates, employee issues and such."

• Q: When's the last time you wanted to do something on your phone but forgot it at home? What were you trying to accomplish?
• A: "To be honest, I think people would better in a lot of occasions without their phone, especially when it's a gathering event. But yea, one time I was out in the middle of a lake, and I forgot my phone in my friend's truck. I wished I could check the stocks."

• Q: Where do you typically keep your phone?
• A: "I keep it in my pocket."

• Q: What if you could do that on your wrist without your phone, how would you want to perform the task?
• A: "Well, before that, I'm just going to say that I think it's going to be worse. I already check my stocks often enough that if I had it strapped to my wrist, I'd be looking my watch more than looking at you right now. But I think if I could get some sort of notifications on drastic price changes, or if I owned a business, daily sales report or something, that'll be interesting."

Summary

David wants the wrist technology only if it doesn't distract him from interacting with people. He would like to see the technology delivering mission-critical updates from businesses without having to manually pull out the information from his phone.

Brainstorming

A dozen of ideas I brainstormed quickly based on potential user interviews. Out of all these ideas, my favorite one is probably the one where head icons of your favorite icons are shown with number badges that indicate how many updates each of them has. 

The reason why I chose this particular application interface is because it's a great way of presenting and organizing information in a people-centric way and is general enough to be applied to many applications, including the ones from the two interviews. 

The key of this interface is that behind each head icon, the application aggregates updates from multiple sources (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Messages, Instagram, Email, etc.), and show them as a single number on the icon. You can use this to track employees, where the sources would some sort of productivity monitoring software. You can also use this to keep in close touch with your favorite people, like your family members and friends you care about, and not miss any updates from any of their social network channels.

Prototyping

I picked a round watch form factor because it seems to be the most natural option to present head icons, which are all round objects. I also think because the application needs to be general enough to present anything from social network to office productivity updates for any person, a stream of update "cards" that has source-indicating icons on the top left corner seems like a good way of organizing chronological information. Lastly, I think the application should allow quick actions specific to each source. For Facebook, as shown in the example, you'd be able to either "Like" an update, or to reply by dictation.

Feedback

I tested this with about 3 users who think they'd try out the idea of "people-centric social network update aggregation." Here is a list of important insights after testing with them:

• The round screen factor is actually inconvenient for reading updates or dictating replies, since there's a lot of screen space wasted and text doesn't align up nicely.
  
• Dictation was poorly received as generally a bad way to input anything substantial. Users also found it hard to edit incorrectly dictated text. 
• There's no way to attach a picture as a reply.

Some possible solutions to these issues are:

1. Changing the screen factor to be square, so it's more space-efficient.
   
2. Providing canned responses or finger-drawing letter-by-letter input.
   
3. Providing a way to connect and load pictures from your smartphone.