Chatbots on Apple Watch?!
Apple Watch was designed to become the most personal device which Apple has ever made. It was introduced more than 3 years ago and it’s amazing how many people own one of the three generations of the Apple Watch. In this period Apple announced some radical changes — notably interface, standalone apps or eSIM.
It’s strange but I think after 30 million Apple Watches sold it’s still not clear what it should be used for. Of course you can check your notifications or the time, probably set a timer more easily than on your phone but it would not justify spending 400–500 dollars for it.
There are more than 100.000 Messenger chatbots on Facebook which could provide an amazingly richer experience on the Apple Watch as well. We have been working on our chatbot engine for approx. 1 year and we gathered a lot of experience during this period of time. So it was the time to make a short experiment with chatbots on Apple Watch.
‘Pretotyping’
“The term and concept of pretotyping was originally developed by Alberto Savoia in 2009 while he was working at Google as Engineering Director and Innovation Agitator.”
‘Pretotypes’ help you to make sure you build the right thing before you build it right. Most of the new ideas generally fail and it is almost impossible to predict the actual market success of a new idea. Most companies invest too much energy and money on the wrong ideas and often invest nothing on the right ideas. That’s why it is important to fail fast (in case the idea is wrong) and collect the opinions and experiences which can be used for the ideas that turn out to be spectacular successes.
Traditional prototypes can help to test the ideas and validate the market potential. However in many cases the development of a proper prototype well be too expensive and it takes too long time. It’s not rare to invest months or years and hundreds of thousands dollars to the development.
By contrast the ‘pretotypes’ make it possible to collect experience and predict potential at a fraction of time and cost of the proper prototypes. In the free downloadable ebook you can find a lot of techniques which help you build your own ‘pretotypes’ and fail fast, recover fast and let you explore new tweaks or ideas until you reach your ultimate goal.
Testing the chatbots
We really wanted this as a short experiment so we haven’t made any developments. Instead we were looking for a prototype tool which works on the Apple Watch as well. Unfortunately I have to say that there is no good tool for creating prototypes for the Apple Watch. Most prototype products do not even support it or if they do they just don’t work at all (e.g. Invision). With some luck and after waiting for a software update from Marvel App we were able to start working on the prototype. We created a fairly short conversation which contained the most frequently used and essential UI elements.
We have designed and tested plenty of conversations and were really eager to check them on Apple Watch. But the preparation lasted much longer than the smile on our face when we started using it on our wrist.
Difficulties of the Apple Watch
- inconvenience: one the biggest problems was that using your Apple Watch is not a natural body posture. Even though the conversation was short, keeping your arm raised for a minute is still too long and quite tiring.
- readability: the messages were really short but they were still too big for the screen size of the Apple Watch. And it’s really interesting that you are much less patient with your watch than with your phone. Reading anything on your wrist, which is not extremely essential, just doesn’t work at all.
- transparency: thanks to the small screen size you can only see a really short part of the conversation. And without the holistic view it is extremely hard to digest content and follow the conversation.
Regrettably the following statement is still true:
„If you measure interactions with your iOS app in minutes, you can expect interactions with your Watch app to be measured in seconds”.
Lessons learned
Coming up with new ideas is easy, start working on these ideas is exhilarating, but making the decision to stop working on them is tough. It is especially unimaginable without making your ‘pretotypes’ and get the first-hand feedback at a very early phase. The more time you spend on it, the harder the decision will be.
I’m pretty sure the Apple Watch will find its right place in the iOS ecosystem in the next few years but it’s sure not the chatbots are the right direction for it. I still strongly believe that the Apple should focus on the health data with the Watch and it will be an essential device for everyone.
We are all ears about your tricks in regards of your experiences! Reach out to us if you have any questions.
