Dude, where’s my wearable app?
What Intuit learned building 8 apps in 4 hours for Apple Watch, Android Wear and Pebble
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — What do you do when you’re a 32-year-old powerhouse software startup and there’s a hot new hardware category? If you’re Intuit, you gather your developer teams for a half-day jam to get the creative juices flowing.
That’s just what we did at a recent Wearables Hackathon, where an impressive eight prototype smartwatch apps were created in just four hours for Apple, Android Wear and Pebble devices. Some were proof of concept creations, but some could turn into full production-level apps.
Our aim was to ask a broad question: What can smartwatches do for us? The wearables market is expected to grow at a compound rate of 35% by 2019 with smartwatches dominating the category. But it’s clear by now that there will be less of an immediate market impact than we saw with iPhones or tablets — in large part because too many consumers still don’t understand how wearables will affect them. Clunky styling, limited battery life and lack of a “killer app” is hampering adoption of smartwatches in particular.
Still, with the new Apple Watch, heat on the horizon from Google (hello, I/O), and a new Pebble watch soon to land, there’s no denying the wrist is hot property. Apple Watch owners already have new ways to keep an eye on their money with TurboTax and Mint apps for Apple Watch, but that’s just the beginning.
The possibilities are exciting for us at Intuit because we’re very customer-focused. When new technologies surface, we rapidly build experimental systems that help us to understand how our customers will use them.
We take pride in seizing early-adopter opportunities to delight our customers with data. In 2008, we released SnapTax for the iPhone and everyone thought it was such a ridiculous idea it ended up on Saturday Night Live. Do your taxes on a phone? Hah! Today, though, 40% of TurboTax users tap into the mobile experience.
In that sense, the smartwatch is like a gift from the future. At the hackathon, we unwrapped it to test our internal services that enable watch app creation across multiple platforms.
We challenged our teams to come up with novel applications — something that might delight you when it arrives at your watch at just the right time. One group created an Android app that pings you with new job listings. Another came up with a Yelp-style app for people to easily share local businesses they love with friends. One of our San Diego developers has a hard time remembering whether or not he’s locked his car or where his car is, for that matter: He knocked together a quick Pebble app called “Dude, Where’s My Car” that helps you find it.
Over the course of the four hours, we deepened our understanding of a few key things:
PHONING HOME. The bulk of the computing power resides in the cloud, and that connects to your mobile device, not the watch. For the near term future, most watches will be tethered to phones for most functions. The two of them can work together to provide more contextual information. Together they can reliably tell if you are standing or sitting, for instance, or combine information about your heart rate from your watch with your phone’s location in order to determine your exertion level while you work in your back yard.
(SCREEN) SIZE — AND CONTEXT — MATTERS. In addition to design considerations, those tiny screens bring an opportunity for a new type of quick interaction that can be short and meaningful. After all, you now have a new screen that is more accessible than the one in your pocket. The challenge is to figure out how to best take advantage of this new capability. Something you might spend 10 minutes interacting with on the desktop becomes five minutes on a tablet, two minutes on a phone — and two seconds on a watch. These new apps should deftly inform and enable without disrupting.
ALL ABOUT THAT PUSH. Perhaps unsurprisingly, context relevance is what really makes the watch cool. The perfect watch app is like a superpower. You get personalized information, often from the outside world, at the right time and place in the right context that is timely, relevant and actionable. It probably doesn’t make sense for us to remind you that your taxes are coming due if you are out for a run, but it does when you are balancing your checkbook in the beginning of April. With a simple glance at your wrist, you suddenly know things that you wouldn’t otherwise know, or you can do things that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. Whoever can best anticipate and proactively assist the user will produce the most delightful push-based applications. As my colleague Cindy Osmon, Principal Engineer on the Innovation and Advanced Technology team, says, “It’s all about that push.”
It became clear to all of us who participated that our first Wearables Hackathon would not be our last. Intuit CTO Tayloe Stansbury expressed his excitement over the exercise and over the possibilities for quick, sharp innovation for Intuit on wearables.
The event really drove home the point that developing for wearables may be different but it doesn’t have to be hard. And if we remain focused on using its new technology to solve customer problems, we’ll be heading in the right direction
