In Defense of Traditional Wearage
Let’s get this covered right up top: I really like my wrists. Unlike some other body parts (looking at you, pointy teeth in the top-front corners), I don’t have a combative or even love/hate relationship with these lil’ guys. They’ve served me well for 30 years and I eagerly seize opportunities to serve them in kind. All of this, news spouting forth from CES, and 2015 tech prognotications have me concerned about the present, the future, wearable tech, interaction design and (most acutely) smartwatches.
Do I have a smartwatch? Yes. Do I wear a smartwatch? Occasionally! Less than I hoped I would. Why? It’s complicated.
Mostly, I like liking my wrists. I let them know I like them by paying them little to no attention. More importantly, it’s becoming clear that smartwatches in early 2015 are the worst kind of product design up-and-comer: the solution in search of a problem.
It didn’t have to be this way. Traditional wristwatches are a solid solution to a real problem. Time is important and full-sized clocks are heavy. While Wikipedia admits the watch’s origin story is not unassailably tellable, it spins two plausible yarns:
One account says that the word “watch” came from the Old English word woecce which meant “watchman”, because it was used by town watchmen to keep track of their shifts at work. Another says that the term came from 17th century sailors, who used the new mechanisms to time the length of their shipboard watches (duty shifts).
So we have some people with important things to do and one important thing to know: Am I done yet? If carrying a full-sized clock made sense, they likely would have (and may have tried, for all I know and hope). If these folks had seen and/or played Flappy Bird, they may have wanted it on their watches. The tiny designer on my shoulder is shouting, right now, “THEY’D BE WRONG TO WANT THAT” while the normal, fun-loving person on my other shoulder squeals in anticipation of gaming, reading, calling, snapping, drawing, and word processing right between their arm and their hand.
The tiny designer is correct. But almost nobody’s listening.
Apple Watch
The elephant in the room. I don’t know what this nigh-hypothetical doo-dad will feel like when I eventually try one on (which I will, excitedly, as close to its launch as possible) but I’ve seen and heard what Apple has shown and said. Most of it looks and sounds awful.
For crying out loud, would ya look at all those tiny icons? Our good pal, the wrist, awash in a sea of indecipherable glyphs. The photo thumbnails. The zooming, my word, the zooming.
Good on Cupertino for for nodding vaguely in the direction of watches that do a job that needs doin’ with their “Digital Crown,” but humbug to its proposed sometimes-it-zooms-but-sometimes-it-scrolls behavior. Balls to the seemingly infinite depth of what little interface we’ve seen. Apple’s own marketing materials refer to particular UI elements as “complications.” Honestly. And that’s on the Timekeeping page.
We’ve come to rely on Apple’s design to show us the way with “A Thousand No’s for Every Yes.” If what we’ve seen is any indication, they’re about to deliver “Yes, Yes, a Thousand Times Yes” to wrists around the world, leaving broken human-wrist relationships in its wake. No thanks.
Android Wear
When I first saw Android Wear, I thought they’d cracked it. Watches are for telling the time, but what is time made of? The length of your commute. Your next appointment. The news that your flight’s been delayed. When your package will arrive. How long this song will last, for better or worse.
What do we wish time was less made of? Hailing cabs. Typing simple search queries. Finding the remote. Tapping on glass. Pulling a phone out of our pocket, unlocking it, finding and opening a messaging app to see spam.
Most of this, and not a whole lot else, is taken care of by Google Now. Imagine the restraint and focus it would have taken to launch Android Wear with Google Now, notification support, and… nothing. The simplicity. The utility. This is, unfortunately, not the product as launched.
Google Now’s onboard. Notifications are there. Also, there are other apps. Third party apps that, despite Google’s admirable efforts at guidance, sometimes miss the mark when it comes to maintaining the peace between our minds and our wrists. Don’t get me wrong; a lot of these apps are great, glanceable, useful. Many are none of these things. Worst of all, games. Look for things to get worse as more Android Wear devices find their way onto arms.
Don’t get me started on battery life. Daily charging, while not a dealbreaker for some, will keep once-desired but now-discarded Android Wear watches parked on nightstands worldwide.
Samsung Gear
There’s a camera. There’s an IR blaster. The battery lasts a day if you’re lucky. They blew it.
Pebble
The Pebble Watch and its handsome but relatively high falootin’ carpetbagger cousin Pebble Steel are, to my mind, the closest thing to a home run in this space. Worth mentioning: the former has been available for two years after exceeding its funding goal (by a country mile) on KickStarter.
It’s waterproof. It lasts not only a full day, but multiple full days on a charge. It’s focused on what matters: the time, notifications, and basically nothing else. It works with your iPhone or your Android handset. It’s also offered at an entry price of $99 which, while non-trivial, takes the sting out of buying and later neglecting or losing or breaking the thing.
There is, of course, a nit and by god I plan to pick it. It’s dead simple to pair with your phone- within minutes, you’ll have every. Single. Notification on your phone piped straight to your wrist. After an hour of settings-grooming, you get your wrist back along with the rest of your life, but the assumption that everything your phone vibrates about should also vibrate your wrist is a misfire. Assuming that you want none of it and letting you tell it otherwise would have been more respectful of the trust you’ve built with your wrist over the years.
There’s a Lesson in Here, I Swear!
These are not all of the smartwatches, but they are some notable ones. There are many things I find neat/cool/futury about smartwatches, but the errant design strategies and decisions being made have my attention at the moment.
I don’t make a habit of criticizing the work smart and hard-working design teams are and should be proud of. Designers are my people and I deeply appreciate their efforts to help problems get solved. I realize there are important constraints (as crucial to design as opportunity) which I’ll never see but make products what they are. But I see the potential here (as do many others) and believe we’re missing it.
Smartwatches can save our precious battery life by showing us messages that aren’t worth pulling a phone out to read. They can feed our data-hungry services with their sensors, helping us to live healthier lives. They can give us control over ever-smartening homes and all the (Internet Of) things we deeply need to have. They can even, maybe, someday, look cool.
My design challenge to those putting screens on arms: simplify our relationship with the internet without complicating our relationship with our wrists. They deserve it.
