A Guide to Design for Wearables
Back in the days we had a room for a computer. If you needed to use the computer you went to the room. If you were not in the room, you could not have access to the computer. And even if you did, without months of specialised training, you would hardly be competent enough to use the computer.
Today, a computer does not need a separate room. All it needs apparently, is another body part to latch onto, and you have yet another “smart”-device. Smart-watches for your wrists, noise-cancelling headphones for your ears (or your bones, if they use bone-conduction technology), augmenting smart-glasses for your eyes, self-lacing sneakers for your feet, posture-correcting doodads for your back.
It’s a miracle we haven’t all become cyborgs.
With all this hype surrounding the adoption and adaption of wearable tech, it is imperative that the products be well-designed, if they actually aim to improve quality-of-life. For this article, we’ll be taking a look at three of the most popular wearables — smart-watches, headphones, and smart-glasses — their constraints and their quirks.
1. Smartwatches
Many people have claimed, that no one “needs” an Apple Watch. The fact that some of these very people, got themselves a brand new Apple Watch soon after, is a totally different story. The brand-appeal aside, there is one main reason why people want a “smart” watch — the ability to see and reply to messages and phone calls, straight from the wrist. But as empowering as it sounds, there is a huge roadblock.
The Screen is Tiny!
TVs and monitors and laptops and tablets have been creeping up their screen sizes even as you read this sentence. The problem with smart-watches however, is that their displays can only get so big. Its a wrist-watch on steroids, not a grandfather clock. When you take that tiny screen and try to jam a QWERTY keyboard in there, you are fighting for space with the display of the typed letters too. Sure, Apple has a done a decent job, and the watches are improving with every new version — but the usability problems from Series 1, are still seen lingering around now that Series 6 has hit the stores, not to mention all the other smart-watch makers.
The Fails
- The main disadvantage of the small screen is that the viewport is only a small portion of the entire window that we are used to seeing even on the phones with only 4-inches of screen real-estate. Since small amounts of information is visible at a time, it means that you would need to keep equivalently more amount of information in your short-term memory. Now, we all know that is limited. And this is where the first stumble happens.
- Let’s say you’re a memory-game champion, and you do not face the problem of memorising where things are in the UI. Even then, the number of interactions needed to get to your desired point is going to be very high. Here lies stumble number two.
- The third and perhaps the most irritating, and in some cases self-deprecating, problem, is that of having a fat finger. A fat finger-pad to be more precise. When the size of a button in the UI is smaller than your finger-pad it becomes somewhat nerve-wracking to progress at tasks using the UI. Taking away more confidence from the user, is the problem of occlusion — not being able to see what lies under the fat-finger-pad. A study conducted by Dandekar et al in 2003 points to the discrepancy — the average width of the finger-tip ranges from 1.6cm to 2.0cm, whereas the average screen size of a smart-watch-display is 4.2cm, with the smaller ones hovering around 3.8cm. It is obvious then, that interactions like we are used to on smart-phones will not be the correct role-model for smart-watch interactions, when around 25% of the screen is not visible when being used by just one finger.
Math never lies.
Best Practices
The best way to handle the first encountered fail is to make customised content for smart-watches, so that only the very important information is communicated in the most minimal way possible. In continuation, to facilitate taking actions for more complicated tasks, handoff should be very seamless and affordable. For negating the second stumble, you would need to design new forms of interactions that minimise the combination of the watch display and our finger. And as far as the fat-finger problem is concerned, in combination of the two best practices mentioned above, you would need to give all CTA’s the minimum dimension of 1cmx1cm.
- Two very important case studies would be StripeMaps — aimed at improving map-based pedestrian navigation for smart-watches, and ScrollingHome — targeting to bring image-based indoor navigation, also for smart-watches, that are showing the way forward for better and more intuitive interactions with the wrist-computers.
It seems, from a usability-perspective, a very thorough bottom-up analysis of the design and multiple corresponding iterations, could be the only way out to shift the watches from novelty items to actually usable powerful wrist-gadgets.
2. Headphones
Unless you own a pair of $2500 open-backs from Sennheiser, you are one of the millions who just want some decent music in their ears during commute or workouts. And when that is the case, the design of headphones needs to be very thoughtful.
Many headphones come with accompanying apps for smartphones — companies push and promote these apps quite extensively. Some brands boast of making headphones for all possible scenarios that you could be in across a day in your life. Quite a few brands like to copy the innovators in the field, and this saturates the market with very similar looking models. True, they sprinkle in a few tiny perks here and there, but for the most part, as far as the layman is concerned — “all headphones look the same now.” If you want a headphone that will leave you not feeling too fatigued at the end of a four-hour-listening session, you better be able to dish out at least a few hundred dollars. Also, what if I have more than one device that I want to connect the headphone to at once? Only the top-tier headphones have this feature — what about the masses?
“I never use the app, I am not sure what function it does.”
- a premium-headphone user
Yutong Zhang has a wonderful documentation of how she redesigned the Sony headphones.
The extensive interviews that were conducted, point to facts that (unsurprisingly) are fully contradictory to the assumptions made by the companies.
Users valued comfort, portability, appearance, and price for headphones.
Most users found the app useless or never used it.
Users owned different headphones for different scenarios.
Users cared about the uniqueness of their headphones.
Users with many devices would have a hard time pairing & unpairing the headphones
Another case study conducted by Garrett McIndoe for Bowers & Wilkins, demonstrates that the main factors people take into account when getting a pair of headphones, are compromised in the existing designs.
Physical UI — confusing.
Sound design — indecipherable.
Comfort — too fatiguing.
Like smart-watches, headphones need a completely different interaction model. It’s a long way to go before a pair of headphones can be lauded for actually how enabling and usable it is.
3. Eyewear
Anyone remember Google Glass? Or the ones by Snapchat — the Snap Spectacles? Yes, of course the article would be worthless if we didn’t ponder on where they went wrong, and what could’ve been done right.
As far as Google Glass is concerned, it never could cross the chasm from the adopters to the adapters. Clara Yoon in her article from 2018, lists the assumptions that Google made — leading to the ultimate downfall of the product. The three main reasons boil down to a lack of consensus on the part of the designers of the Google Glass, regarding—
where the Glass would be used,
why would people want to use the Glass at all, and
how the Glass would be used.
To best understand what pitfalls to avoid if and when you work on augmenting spectacles, go through the failures of the Google Glass, in details, here —
Moving onto further design-specific problems, Josh Constine on his 2017 piece for TechCrunch, points to the failures on the part of Snap, that led to the demise of the Snapchat Spectacles. This case study is more interesting, due to the involvement of many design phases across the entire life-cycle of the product. Leaving aside the countless usability problems that the Spectacles had, numerous factors like, a “botched roll-out” and avoidance of the established social-media “influencers” contributed significantly, in not helping mitigate the fear and doubt that the general public had with respect to cameras in spectacles.
For a v1 product, Spectacles were a valiant effort.
True, but to improve upon the previous mistakes and actually make a wearable device for our eyes, would need a thorough inspection of the market and the state-of-the-art as far as HCI is concerned. For tech in eyewear to be a thing for the general public, it has to be in a totally different ballpark of intuitiveness, than it is today.
Many a developer of the present times, have the habit of copy-pasting code from Stack Overflow, without analysing its suitability and efficiency. Going by the same line, many designers have a tendency to blindly copy design elements from Pinterest, Behance or Dribbble, without checking for appropriateness, leave alone looking ahead to see if the design problem is being attended to at all. This mindless format of working at such crucial professions, needs to be done away with. Interaction models of one mobile application are not supposed to work, for another. It could as a mere coincidence, but that’s highly unlikely, even for the exact same smartphone model.
This is not a conjecture. It’s the truth.
And once we acknowledge this truth, we, as designers, will also start to appreciate the tremendous (and often, critical) importance of designing different interaction models for different hardware platforms — more so, for wearables.
When we wear clothes, when we embellish ourselves with jewellery — it all works because, we feel it all as an extension of ourselves — after all, it’s on our body for crying out loud. Similar, if not more, personal connections are developed when wearable tech are adopted. This makes the problem of designing for wearables, so very challenging, while at the same time, so intriguing, and most importantly — so much fun.
Cheers!
