I’ve used my Apple Watch for just short of a month before it began collecting dust on my table.
I’ll try to explain why with the Hooked model, as laid out in the book of the same name by Nir Eyal. The basis of the Hooked model is derived from habit-forming products, ones that users tend to use over and over again, like Facebook and Google. One of the reasons these products have high retention is because they scratch an itch, like the need to search or need to connect with friends. The itch is the internal trigger for the user to go back to the product without any prompting.
So in order for a watch to become a habit-forming product, or for me to put it on everyday, it would need to scratch an itch. And before we all carried phones in our pockets, it did just that: it satisfied the need to tell time. I remember I always checked I had my watch before leaving home. Over the years, my cellphone has been able to relieve that itch instead and now I have 5 different watches all sitting in my dresser as pieces of jewelry rather than a tools of utility.
If the smart watch doesn’t tell time better than the phone, does it scratch any other itch? I’ve heard that the main attractiveness of any smart watch is it’s supposed to bring the notifications you depend on closer to you by making them more readily accessible. Notifications are recognized as a type of external trigger in the book Hooked, they prompt you to come back to the product aside from your own calling. So theoretically, with my watch constantly pulling me in with sounds and vibrations, I should have developed a habit of checking notifications on my watch.
Unfortunately, there is a lack of reward for using the smart watch to check notifications. In the Hooked model, good products provide variable reward or serendipity for use, so that the user is delighted every time she engages with the product. In the case of the Apple Watch, I’ve noticed it takes longer for me to go through my notifications than on the phone. On the phone’s lock screen/notification center, I can see several notifications at a time, but on the small screen of the watch, I have to scroll through each notification one by one. Additionally, for the really important notifications, like messages or breaking news on Twitter, diving-in on the watch is just a poor experience —3rd-party watch apps are slow to load and most of them have a bare-bone feature set. I end-up having to pull out my phone and thus wasted time starring at my watch screen in the first place.
The problem with the Apple Watch (or any smart watch for that matter) is that it’s still a vitamin (its benefits are not immediately clear, as described in the book), not a painkiller. It can’t replace the phone, but rather is a nice-to-have companion. In fact, having the watch added more pain to my life because I had to carry and charge an extra gadget.
In the end, without any internal triggers and gratifying rewards, using the Apple Watch is something I can’t get hooked on.
