For this design assignment, I chose to focus on a smartwatch application design which is fit for working professionals as well as college students, two groups of people who are always on the go. Smartphones are an integral part of our daily lives: it's the device that we use to stay connected to the world via email, snapchat, or other applications, as well as the preferred platforms to organize our lives.
I chose to return to the company where I had interned over the summer to gather some user insight to start. One issue which all the interviewees brought up was the fact that it is sometimes inconvenient to always be checking one's phone - it requires the individual to drop the current context momentarily and immerse themselves in their device. However, this may be hard to do if one is in a meeting or at a meal or any other social function where one's attention is required. One interviewee, a business manager, pointed out that they always felt very rude doing that, and even more so when other did the same to them. If one is going to check their notifications, it has to be done in a subtle and unsuspecting manner, the perfect task for a watch.
While brainstorming ideas for an application design, I focused mainly on the application design being inconspicuous, but still "loud" enough so that the user will not miss an event or notification that can be time sensitive. With subtlety in mind, one of the first mechanisms I ruled out was using a vibration motor to alert the user whenever a new notification pops up, the reasons being 1) people tend to rest their hands (and thus their wrists) on the table, and having the watch vibrate on the table would be just as distracting as a vibrating smartphone 2) an individual with many ongoing notifications which came in one after the other would soon feel irritated with the vibration, which would provide a very poor user experience.
Instead, I took my smartphone as an inspiration. There is a small built-in light at the top left corner of my device which serves as a reminder about events and notifications. Its most basic function is to notify the user about the battery of the status when the phone is charging - red means currently charging and green means fully charged. However, when it receives notifications from applications on my device, first the screen will light up to allow a quick glance at the new activity, then after the screen goes back to sleep, the light will flash periodically to remind the user to check their notifications. The color of the light will change according to which application the alert is coming from - baby blue for Twitter, bright green for LINE, yellow for snapchat, and so on.
That was the premise for the first idea, which is just a rim around the screen which will light up according to the notification being pushed. But the I thought, hey, why are people constantly neglecting our pain and temperatures receptors and only focusing on the motor receptors? Thus, I thought it would be very interesting to experiment with little zaps, pricks, taps, tightening the wristband or different temperatures to signify the urgency of different events and notifications, which encompasses two or three ideas.
Then I decided to come back to the lights idea because I liked it so much. I thought about the way people wore their watches and how they tend to check it by rotating the wrist inward, this means that I can take advantage of the moments in between as the user rotates their wrist to have some signal on the "inside" that only they could see. I also though it could be interesting to have the watch be attached to a small bluetooth device that can be concealed behind the ears and alert the user through vibration, but that also encountered the problem when there is notification overload. Then I thought perhaps the screen can be "extended" to the strap to allow more information to be displayed, but that may defeat the original purpose of getting information at a glance.
This is the point when I finally arrive at my final idea, which is also the design I chose. I decided to partition the edge of the screen into four slices, and when a new push notification arrives, it will appear on the screen of the watch, then the application will queue the new alert and determine the urgency of the event (perhaps determined by its imminence), then the top left corner piece will light up (if that is the first notification received) and will stay lit until the user has looked at the notification. Otherwise if other notifications come in, they will be classified accordingly and the other corners will also light up.
Since the application I had designed couldn't quite stand alone without some indications of what was happening, when I went out for user feedback, I had to verbally tell the users testing my prototype what was going on in each step. Thus I could not make very thorough observations of their behavior (although in my case that might have been a good thing, since my application is actually aiming for inaction). However, something one user did point out was the fact having only four corners will limit the number of notifications your can receive, namely if someone uses many different apps then it could be very easy to miss an alert, so further partitioning of the screen should be considered. Secondly, another user mentioned that the smartwatch needs to be compatible with other devices in order to sync or import a calendar or events stored elsewhere. Additionally, one user mentioned that it may be helpful to see the actual number of notifications received from each app, as opposed to just knowing where the alerts are coming from.
Judging by the feedback, the application I envisioned would need to have a page of its own where it keeps track of the push notifications being sent by each application which is active, which may solve the problem of many apps alerting the user at once and also being able to see recent activities.
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