Too small to care? Smartwatch apps that offer potential for mobile storytelling
Smartwatches aren’t just for counting your steps anymore.
In the same panel discussions, blogposts and meetings where people are discussing the potential that VR and chatbots offer to news and storytelling, we should also be thinking about the emerging capabilities of wearables — more specifically, smartwatches. Wearable usage in the US is expected to increase by 60% this year, and a steady stream of smartwatch apps are being released that could have a significant impact on where and how we tell stories on mobile.
Smartwatches already allow users to make phone calls, play games, retweet, favorite Vines and even watch YouTube videos. Gaming, productivity and social app developers have been quietly adapting their content for people’s wrists, and most publishers up to now have treated smartwatches just as a bonus screen for notifications and headlines.
Here are three interesting types of smartwatch apps that could support the way we tell stories in the future, and possibly even help improve publishers’ relationships with an increasingly mobile audience.
1. One-to-one watch face integrations
Android Wear allows you to pair up with someone close to you through the Together app; Apple’s Digital Touch lets you create a small inner circle.
Two smartwatch apps that take advantage of the quality of intimacy inherent in mobile devices are Apple’s Digital Touch and Android Wear’s Together app. Both apps allow you to connect your watch face to another one, and directly send personal messages.
The main differences between the products are the number of people you can connect with and the types of information you can share. Apple’s Digital Touch allows you to share your heartbeat, “taps” and freehand sketches with a handful of people. Android Wear’s Together app allows you to share doodles, emoji, drawings and your activity status, but only with one contact.
The interesting question here for publishers is: what could we offer users if they connected their smartwatches directly with our journalism? And how is that different and better than what we’re sending to mobile phones?
In many ways, pursuing this one-to-one connection with audiences is the reason publishers are experimenting with chat apps and emerging social platforms. Connecting with a user via smartwatch — which is likely to be on them as well as with them for the entire day — could provide contextual information about how a person moves through the world in ways that chat and social apps on phones can’t.
Imagine receiving a signal when a reader wakes up and is ready to start reading the news. Instead of sending multiple push notifications and emails updating a single story overnight, publishers could send one update once they received the signal. In exchange for giving publishers permission to use their data, users could receive more relevant information from a publisher.
It’s important to note that ideally this would only happen with full transparency, so a user knows exactly what personal data was being shared with a publisher, and why.
2. Video
Android Wear offers full YouTube video viewing with the Video for Android Wear&YouTube app; Apple Watch allows you to watch Vine videos.
While smartwatches may never become good vehicles for consuming longform content, it’s convenient to view Vines on an Apple Watch and it’s relatively simple to use an Android Wear app to search for and watch YouTube videos right on your wrist. In addition to watching, you can also listen to videos by connecting Bluetooth-enabled headphones to your watch.
It’s worth noting though that this is still early days for smartwatch video apps. The first reviews for the Android Wear app dinged it for draining your watch’s battery, and I did lose about half my battery life watching three short, minute-long clips. However the image quality was surprisingly clear.
In the future, when journalists can stream mobile-friendly live video through YouTube Connect and similar apps, smartwatches could become the quickest and simplest way to distribute live coverage. People could watch stories develop right on their wrists.
Also, smartwatches could improve distribution of publishers’ DIY and lifestyle video content. A user could follow along with a cooking tutorial or a multi-step DIY video on their smartwatch, and pause the video whenever they needed extra time to complete a task. The watch wouldn’t eat up counter space, and it eliminates the risk of dropping or damaging your phone.
3. Web browsers
Android Wear’s Web Browser app is robust and functional; Apple Watch’s WatchWeb offers very basic web browsing.
You might think that browsing web pages on a smartwatch would be unpleasant at best, and infuriating at worst. At present, it is certainly a test of patience. But there are two smartwatch apps that deliver a strong proof of concept for browsing on a watch.
The Web Browser for Android Wear app and the WatchWeb app for Apple Watch ($0.99) both allow users to type or say search terms out loud to get results. The Apple version, though, only allows users to scroll through infinite text scraped from the results pages. Users can’t see images or use any basic web functionality. The Android Wear version is more robust. Google search results shrink down to generally legible cards with links, images and video thumbnails, and users can click through to see full web page results. The web pages render like they would on a phone, tablet or desktop, but on a very small screen, and very, very slowly. Most of the time the page centers on the watch face, and you don’t have to swipe left or right to see what’s “off-screen”. I was even able to successfully log into my Amazon account on my Moto 360.
These days smart publishers are focusing on making their web pages light, fast and mobile friendly. Platform initiatives like Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles are clear signs that in the future, success on mobile is practically synonymous with speed, and there is a productive challenge embedded in the idea of optimizing a web page for watches.
It would be interesting to convene brainstorming sessions around what a smartwatch-friendly version of your site might look like. Even if the outcome wasn’t an entirely new product, it’s likely that the conversation would inspire teams to be even smarter on mobile, and figure out how to capitalize on constraints we know are becoming more important.
Smartwatches were originally pitched as products to help people “look back up” in the world instead of getting buried in a phone, but if battery life, Wi-Fi and processing power improve, and the ability to pay is added, they could become primary devices for getting news updates, watching short videos, completing purchases and browsing the web for quick facts.
Let’s acknowledge though, that a few things will continue to be big challenges on smartwatches, including interactivity and sound.
It’s not easy to change the volume on a YouTube video without accidentally swiping to dismiss it, and keyboard usage may never be completely intuitive on a watch. Also, while Bluetooth headphones enable you to hear YouTube audio or take a phone call a smartwatch, they may never offer big advantages over smartphones.
The mobile lab is currently preparing to experiment with one of its first five areas of focus: live coverage. While we might not focus on smartwatches specifically, the conversations had while writing this post have inspired our thinking around how speed, context and very small screens can transform the way we cover live events.
We look forward to hearing your thoughts, and please email us anytime at innovationlab@theguardian.com.
The Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab operates with the generous support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
