Adventures in Apple Watch from a Product, Design, and Engineering Perspective
Thoughts on building an enterprise watch app from the BetterWorks mobile team.
Consumerization of the enterprise is a common thread these days. Millennials entering today’s workforce are not only better educated than generations of the past, but also the most tech savvy, having access to smartphones and other mobile innovations by the time they entered high school. With the exponential usage of mobile in both personal and work contexts, today’s workforce is “always on”; the work-life balance of the past is shifting toward a work-life integration, where workplace logistics are more flexible, and work happens at all hours from all places. Because of this transition, platforms of the new workplace must be equally or more engaging than consumer experiences to compete for user’s attention. We at BetterWorks saw the Apple Watch as a perfect opportunity to deliver these lightweight, context specific experiences to our users. We’re excited to share some insight from a Product, Engineering, and Design perspective on our experiences adventuring in this new form factor.
Vipul Galal, Mobile Product Manager
With the coming release of the Apple Watch, we’re seeing a ton of previews of how mobile apps will leverage the Apple Watch to supplement their current experience. In reviewing these images, I noticed a common thread across all of them: they are all consumer apps! I’m not entirely surprised, as the “mobile revolution” has always been consumer first. Smartphones, tablets and now wearables, enterprise software has always lagged in addressing these devices. What’s ironic though is the adoption of desktop PCs was the exact opposite. Desktop computing started in the workplace and then eventually evolved for the consumer. Enterprises quickly saw the efficiencies that were gained by computing platforms, so they essentially drove the creation of the desktop PC business. Enterprises have started to see similar benefits from mobile, but investment and adoption into mobile applications has been cautious at best.
At BetterWorks, we are trying to turn a new leaf in how enterprise software fits into the mobile ecosystem. As with any product, we’re constantly learning about how users engage with our platform through different mediums. Our foray of building an Apple Watch app is our way to experiment with these use cases, just like our consumer app counterparts. We don’t think enterprise apps should address wearables at a different cadence than consumer apps. If anything, we feel enterprises apps are well suited to drive the charge on uncovering the capabilities of these new devices, just like how desktop PCs were born.
This line of thinking has proliferated everything we do at BetterWorks. From architecting our mobile clients to designing the next iteration of our product, being agnostic to the devices we support changes the way we think about our platform. It expands the possibilities of what we can achieve in quantifying work.
Connor Smith, Mobile Developer
iOS 7 brought about a whole new way to think about and engineer apps. I remember thinking at the time, “this changes everything.” Then last June when Apple announced iOS 8 they blew us out of the water, again. To put things into perspective, Apple’s unveiling of Swift, an entirely new programming language, was just the icing on the cake. Whether you’re making a consumer app or an enterprise app, as an iOS developer you have a responsibility to be cognizant of the changing landscape, let alone adapt to it!
One of the new technologies introduced in iOS 8 is extensibility, which represents a pretty substantial milestone for the iOS landscape. It allows a portion of your app to be launched from within the confines of another app. In order to share code between an extension and the main app, you need to create what’s called a dynamic framework. Apple Watch apps are treated as app extensions, and follow many of the same rules that regular extensions do. If you think your product will ever include an app extension, bearing in mind more types will likely be introduced down the road, then you should leverage dynamic frameworks early on. Our mobile architecture is built with Apple Watch in mind from the ground up, so not only can you carry your goals in your pocket, but also wear them on your wrist!
Randall Hom, Product Designer
At BetterWorks, we take every design to heart and focus on delivering experiences that allow people to excel at work. There’s really no reason enterprise apps should be clunky experiences that lack any humanistic factor. We were excited by the opportunity to physically connect with our users with our Apple Watch app, but it also provided us with some challenges.
It wasn’t just simplifying an interface into a tiny sized screen, but understanding the experience of a device that you wear every hour. We knew that designing for simplicity should be at the forefront, having a culture that embodies quantified self and studies work behavior day in and day out.
Many ideas we had from the get go could have been of extreme annoyance to the people using the app. Imagine getting an update from a colleague that they completed their goal before you on your wrist. Talk about peer pressure!
Some designs we initially explored:
Designing for Apple Watch allowed us to focus on what we’re really good at — keeping people aligned and focused on what they need to accomplish. It pushed us to explore designs that we would have never thought of otherwise, potentially influencing our mobile and web experiences in the future.
If you’re looking to challenge yourself like our mobile team, check out all the openings we have here at BetterWorks and drop us a note at [email protected] if you think you’re a fit. And of course, stay tuned for the BetterWorks app for the Apple Watch, coming this summer!
