Wearables Are Broken
UpDownLeftRight’s CEO, James King, has had issues with his Apple Watch. How better to go through the grieving process and look to the future than via the medium of, well, Medium.
I just dumped my Apple Watch.
We had a brief, passionate but ultimately tempestuous relationship.
When we first met, I was overwhelmed with excitement about what the future could hold for the two of us. I wanted to introduce it to all of my friends. I took it to meet my parents, eager that they would love it as much as I did.
I got entirely wrapped up in the burgeoning potential, the boundless opportunities. The only limit to the things we could go onto achieve together was imagination itself. In my mind, the future was most definitely now.
Then things started to change (as they’re often want to do in these kinds of affairs). I couldn’t put my finger on exactly the moment that thing turned sour, but the passion stated to slowly ebb away. Little things started to irk me. Too many notifications, too many little reminders. The things that had made me so excited in the first weeks were the very things that made me want to retreat into myself.
Increasingly I needed more and more space. In the early days, I’d never have dreamed of leaving it at home. It went everywhere I did. Slowly, however, I began to need “time apart”. Just a little break that would, no doubt, invigorate the relationship.
It never did.
Self-assuredness, that feeling that someone knows, and is entirely happy and confidant in the person that they are, is one of the things I find most attractive in other human beings. That, I believe, was the biggest problem. Once you get past the shiny newness of the Apple Watch, you begin to realise that you’re interacting with a device that has no sense of who, or what, it actually is.
And so we’re going to see other people.
Why Wearables need fixing
This, it seems, is not a problem only I have experienced. Indeed, it appears that I might be in, certainly when compared to other Apple products, a minority who were prepared to take the plunge in the first place. A report from third-party analysts Slice Intelligence not only show that Apple Watch sales are down 90% since launch — a big deal, since it implies early adopters aren’t converting more cautious buyers with glowing word-of-mouth — but also that Fitbit is outselling Apple in the wearables space. Apple may have already crushed small time smartwatch companies like Pebble, but the Watch has failed to disrupt the larger wearable marketplace.
Is this simply a case of Apple, for once, just simply getting it wrong? Or is it indicative of a wider problem facing the entire “Wearables” category? Comparatively, Fitbit continues to “crush it”. They continue to hold the biggest slice of the Wearables pie. However, everything may not be as rosy over at camp Fitbit as this might suggest. Malay Gandhi at Rock Health, in a fascinating break down of Fitbit’s IPO and S-1, has calculated that that more than 70% of Fitbit purchasers from the first three quarters of 2014 churned before the end of the year. This aligns with more anecdotal evidence that many of their owners lose enthusiasm for them once the novelty of knowing how many steps they’ve taken wears off. One research firm, Endeavour Partners, estimates that about a third of these trackers get abandoned after six months.
So what needs to change?
How do we create hardware and experiences that are going to get people to engage? To fall head-over-heels in love with a device? To get them to feel the same way about a Wearable that they do about their iPhone?
A Wearable is not a smartphone
What we’re finding is that activity trackers and smart watches aren’t actually creating any unique experiences — we’re all aware on some level of how much we’ve been moving, and serving me some variation of an infographic on that data, or in the case of a smart watch some “glance-able” extension of a smartphone’s feature set — these aren’t use cases that are going to disrupt consumer habits on a large scale. The iPhone completely reinvented the “in-hand” experience — for Wearables to become mainstream we need to do something completely new with the “on-body” experience.
As I mentioned earlier, the Apple Watch seems to be a device with a distinct lack of “design purpose”. It could be argued that Apple is the greatest marketing machine the world has ever seen. There has always seemed to be a tangible sense of something I call Marketing-by-Design that runs through its entire product suite. Yet, for once, even Apple seem to have no clear steer on what exactly the Apple Watch is for. Just watch pardon the pun) their TV spots for it. “Look, you perform a limited version of all the functions available on your iPhone — on your wrist.” Which happens to be, certainly at rest, only ever a few inches from the pocket in which your phone is located.
Design for revolutionary use cases and services
The highly competitive Fitness Tracker is built around particularly narrow use cases and habit sets. For a tangible example of the underlying thesis behind this, visit any gym in the Western world in early January. Viewed in a vacuum, you would think that this might be indicative of the number of users regularly using that gym. Visit that same gym in March, and you’ll see those numbers drastically reduced. I’d very comfortably argue that this is why Fitbit are very reticent to release clear data on user retention.
In order to expand the appeal of Wearables beyond early adopters and Quantified Self fanatics we need to design services and experiences that extrapolate further on the data sets these devices produce.
In an excellent post on Zero UI, my old colleague at Fjord Andy Goodman tells us:
“Zero UI refers to a paradigm where our movements, voice, glances, and even thoughts can all cause systems to respond to us through our environment. At its extreme, Zero UI implies a screen-less, invisible user interface where natural gestures trigger interactions, as if the user was communicating to another person. The replacement of these monolithic screen-based devices by ambient technology that surrounds and immerses us is being driven by Living Services. In the end, this could be a very good thing because social interactions could become more natural again — and not as obviously mediated by devices. Our attention could again return to the people sitting across the dining table, instead of those half a continent away.”
With this in mind, we need to focus on designing Wearables for the use-cases of the future, not to reference, imitate even, the experiences and design theses of the past. Devices that provide immediately useful data and metrics, but then simultaneously look to execute these in revolutionary frameworks and systems that look to the future of an integrated world built on the Internet of Things, or Living Services, will win not only in the short term but also become scalable, industry defining platforms and businesses.
One of our investors, Mark Curtis (also a fellow Fjordian) has provided fascinating insight on Liquid Expectations within Living Services. At UpDownLeftRight, we are looking to engineer products that leverage the increasingly “liquid expectations” of today’s consumer. Indeed, I believe the companies that will lead the charge in the Wearable sector will look to define those “expectations”.
We must blur the lines between rapidly established verticals. The IoT space is currently overly focused on the hardware touchpoints that will make up this connected ecosystem. While we of course need to lay out the infrastructure for IoT, we also need to rapidly focus on the key agents in this system; the users. While embeddable and ingestibles may come into prominence in the future, the best tools for indexing the user, for providing identity in a connected world, are the wristbands and smartwatches of today (I could write a whole other piece on condensing and focusing user indexing in software for IoT — a blog post for the future perhaps). We need to have low-impact devices that act as the central interface terminal for all our interactions with services, experiences and things. At the same time, gesture will play a huge role in the development of Zero UI, and Fitness Trackers, with their plethora of gyros, accelerometers and magnetometers, coupled with their position on the body, are the best positioned to do this.
So I’m an unattached, white male seeking a new partner device. I like long walks by the beach and romantic city breaks. Together, we’ll fix Wearables.
