Notifications & Productivity
Wristly Apple Watch Insider’s Report #26
For the majority of its users, handling notifications on the wrist is one of the primary value propositions for the Apple Watch. We were intrigued to better understand and quantify how we have learned to use the Watch for this very important capability.
First, while the new Taptic engine remains a big crowd favorite, only a minority of users is able to know what type of notification was just received by it. For the very large majority, the nascent reflex in response to a new notification is to simply Tilt the wrist and check it out.
The Tilt is the Primary Ux
In our overall assessment this confirms once again that “gestures” and not “screens” are the primary user-interface for the Apple Watch and we expect that new watchOS 2.x third-party apps will take advantage of this new metaphor.
In other related findings from this research, many users also take advantage of the “Cover to Mute” feature while only a tiny minority modify their overall notification settings regularly.
Next week we will share the findings from the 2nd Moment experiment. There is still time to send us your data, and remember please to add the iPhone model you use in the subject of the email to moment@wristly.co. We are still assuming that the data will back up our insight that Apple Watch owners do use their iPhone less frequently.
Voice-to-Text is the surprise choice for many!
We have regularly found out that Siri and other voice-related tasks were consistently highly rated by the panel and that the majority reported significantly higher usage vs prior expectations. Well, voice-to-text is neck/neck with using the pre-defined canned text answers to respond to incoming messaging.
Meanwhile the Apple Watch advanced “intimate” capabilities (Heart/Sketch) are very infrequently used — most likely a correlation to a still rather small number of Apple Watch owners out there.
The Apple Watch at the Office
For the first time, we started looking at how differently or not, our panel members use their Apple Watch when at the office. Most of the findings are very consistent with common sense and our expectations but we were nonetheless somewhat surprised by some of the numbers.
Here is the full table of results.
As you can see while the majority seem to set a Calendar complication to glance at what’s coming up, very few have created and use a custom Watch face for office hours. On the aggregate the top benefit of using the Watch at the office is to contribute to enhanced productivity and it seems on that score that the Watch delivers for many.
The Watch & Travel
There were no noticeable changes in usage of the Watch when you are travelling — very few have experimented with setting custom face or complications and even when looking at Apple Pay, only 20% of those who use it when traveling have set-up a dedicated credit card to cover their business expenses.
If you have an Apple Watch and are not yet part of our research project, please consider joining at www.wristly.co — it only takes a few minutes once a week to help shape the collective understanding of the ground-breaking platform.
