Hey folks, Welcome to our short video on designing for wearables. We're going to focus exclusively on smart watches, as they're the most prominent wearable these days, so prominent that you can see Ellen on the date of the Apple Watch release took the opportunity to make, in my view, a pretty funny joke about smart watches in general. So this is the lay of the land of smartwatches, at least as of summer 2016 when we're recording this. Actually, right when I am recording this, Apple might be changing this with an announcement. It's currently September 7th. But this is how things are as of September 7th. There are three primary smart watch platforms. There's the Apple Watch, there's the Samsung S-series platform, and then there's the Android Wear platform. The Apple Watch has the bulk of the market share, at least over 50%. Apple weirdly isn't releasing specific sales numbers, which is probably not a good sign actually, but the estimates are around 12 million units have been sold. And I guess about a year plus of release. Some not a huge user base but a large enough one. So the key thing to know about designing for smartwatches, and there's really, there are a couple of more minor things but there really is one big thing when you're designing for smartwatches. And ironically that big thing is that the screen is very, very, very, very small, and this presents enormous design challenges for user interface designers. I just want to provide a bit more detail beyond what you a got when you were, when we were talking about a smartphones as to why screen size in particular why small screen size matters for designers. So first of all when you have a very small screen, a lot of stuff isn't on the screen. Which means it taxes the user's memory. And as we learned in course one, users have quite limited short term memory. And this ends up, you can sort of feel it when you're using a very small screen and hasn't been designed well. Take away have to remember this and this and this was over here and that was over there. It essentially it provides memory load when it's something that's designed well and doing so is not necessary. Secondly more action is required, right? Even if you remember where something was let's say you're reading a piece of text on a smart watch you still have to go all the way back up to that text and then maybe all the way back down to where you were again. So there's a lot of interaction require for something that would require basically no interaction say in a desktop. You're reading a news story where the leads at the top, some factor reading about is at the bottom or a smartwatches scrolling all the way up, and desktop you just look down and then look up and then look down again, right. Okay, so the third thing to remember about designing for various small screen and why small screens really matter for designers is the fat finger problem. This is actually a technical term believe it or not. And the fat finger problem describes the issue that occurs and I'm sure many of you have experience it whether your fingers are very, very tiny or larger like mine. And that is, when you have a tiny little icon, or a tiny little button on a smart watch or on a smart phone, it's really hard to tap on that thing, right? That's called the fat finger problem. Means buttons have to be bigger, which becomes a major issue as your screen is getting smaller, right? And then a correlar to the fat finger problem, but one that's really equally important, I would say, is the issue of occlusion. So I'm going to show you this issue rather than tell you about it. It's pretty easy to see. This is the size of an average finger. And it is to scale roughly with the size of Apple's two smart watch lines. You can see that a huge percentage of the screen is going to be occluded or you can't see it when you're using it right? So you have to assume effectively that your screen size is even smaller than it is when the used is actually physically interacting with the device. It prevents tremendous design challenges and these design challenges have led to some best practices that have been published by some pretty well known folks in the field. Those are based on those from an article written by the Nielsen-Norman Group, which you've heard quite a bit about, I'm sure at this point. And you'll be hearing more about as we move into course four. Suggestion is to make buttons at least 1cm x 1cm, that means roughly a quarter of the smartwatch screen when it comes to the Apple Watch. Anything smaller is going to run through the fat finger problem. You only want to communicate absolutely minimal amounts of information using this smartwatch. You gotta use that space just with extreme optimization and that often means customizing content. So if you say you are a newspaper and you wanted a smartwatch app, you are designing the New York Times or CNN The Washington Post's smartwatch app. In general, you can't just use the same headlines, actually, that you're using for your website, and maybe even your smartphone. You gotta rewrite them so they're a lot shorter. So, you can imagine a headline that says a boat crashes into a whale, 37 people thrown overboard, fortunately everyone's safe. On a smartwatch, you want to make that boat crashes into a whale. Right, that's it. If you look into a literature you'll find that there's actually a lot of experience in the journalism community, shortening headlines from the telegraph days, and these type of things. So, what is old is new again basically with this. You really want to reduce the need to interact with the device with a finger so if there's some way for you to auto scroll or to use other inferred interaction techniques or use more natural user interface techniques like for instance speech like with Siri. Siri is of course on the Apple Watch. You should definitely do that because of the fat finger problem and because of the occlusion that occurs with fingers. And critically, you want to make handoff to other tasks as seamless as possible. You're not going to be able to do everything on a smartwatch. If you're TurboTax, right It would be incredibly silly for you to try to implement the full Turbo Tax product on a smartwatch. That might be the cool thing to do, it might be what your manager says we need to do, but you gotta push back against the manager. That is not going to happen, well, that is, if it does happen, it's not going to go well. There might be some very focused, as per this thing up here, right? Communicating minimal amounts of information, the second point there. There might be some very focused things you can do on a smartwatch, but certainly not the whole product. So, going back to handoff, what do you do? Okay, you take that focus thing that someone needed to do quickly on their smartwatch. I can say maybe take a picture of a receipt in a tax case, right? You make it very easy to, when they sit down by their smartphone, or when they are sitting down by their desktop computer, that the handoff of the work that they did on their smartwatch, to the work that they're going to do on their smartphone, or on their desktop device, that that handoff is seamless. Apple's really trying to do this. The implementation has been somewhat poor so far. But I wouldn't be surprised if that improves very quickly. Perhaps by the time you're actually watching this video. So as you probably noticed in this specialization. Anytime we present a list of best practices it's often followed by a list of failures and this is not going to be an exception. We're going to focus on Apple here because Apple is the large gorilla in the room so they're easy to pick on. Apple has a passcode interface that you can open up the watch just like you can do on the smartphone. And it's buttons are 0.6cm by 0.4cm. What's the problem there? Well, less than best practice one centimeter by one centimeter, and it means people are probably making a lot more errors entering their passcodes on the smartwatch than they would on a smartphone. When you're dealing with a device that it's main benefit is the convenience of being able to do something very quickly because it's down on your wrist. If you go into your pocket, don't have to get your desktop machine out. Having those errors happen is a pretty serious usability hit in my view. Here's another fun one. This is from the Buzzfeed app. They didn't shorten their content. They didn't develop custom content that is optimized for the smartwatch screen. And you can see for this particular poll it's hard to tell what you're voting for, right. One thing that's exciting about smartwatches being so new and there are being so many obvious failures in the most prominent platform is that it presents us researchers and perhaps as you as designers as well or as designers in practice as well of some opportunity to basically define the future of how smartwatch interaction occurs. I've been lucky enough to work on some of those projects, this is one of my favorites, I mentioned that you want to reduce interaction with the device as much as possible and you want to reduce the taxing of a user's short term memory. So we did was in this particular project called StripeMaps, is we took two dimensional route. Say you're walking from a building, so room A in some building to room B in some building. You have to zigzag around. We took the three dimensional route and turn it into a single linear strip. So the interaction only goes one way and you only have to remember up or down not left or right as well. And we implemented this for a smartwatch and it turns out that using this technique people navigated to their destination faster. In the context of a indoor navigation and may make few errors as well. So its pretty exciting. Ask with anything, it's the wild ,wild west so a lot of exciting the opportunities and a lot of pretty large failures. And with that, here's an interesting set of readings that you might be inclined to follow up. This video with the top one is probably the most important and relevant to the lecture, and the bottom two are follow-ups on some of the research I just talked about. And with that, I'll be seeing you in the next video.
