The Problem
Before the release of the Apple watch, our client, a major telecom, wanted to create their own smart watch from the ground up. The UI and UX paradigms for smart watch OS were still primitive and limited to kludgy square-faced designs. They started with a round watch face, custom touch-sensitive watch bezel, a dual e-ink/OELD screen. They needed a completely new smart watch OS to match. The project required out-of-the-box thinking to create brand new interaction paradigms that surpassed existing smart watch designs.
The Team
The team consisted of myself and another senior UX designer. We worked together on the interaction design, UX flows and wireframes of the new smart watch OS. I was the lead for the final visual design.
Gesture Exploration
The first question we asked was how would users interact with a touch-sensitive bezel? The new feature broke out of exisiting users expectations from a smart watch. So we conducted a gesture study to explore which gestures were the most intuitive to understand. Then from these gestures we needed to tie them back to a navigation concept for the new smart watch OS.
The Basic OS Concept
The watch concept would consist of an e-ink screen for the watch face and a full-color screen for homescreen and apps. Through the gesture study, a concept langauge was developed to navigate between the 3 major types of screens.
Workshop
In Palo Alto. we gathered with key stakeholders from our client including the industrial designer responsible for the physical watch design. We presented our research findings, gesture exploration and the basic OS concept. We aligned on our basic conclusions and created a plan for the next phase of the project which included creating a prototype of the watch OS with key screens and a few examples watch apps.
Interaction Design
After determining an intuitive set of custom gestures that utilized the touch-sensitive bezel, it was time to create new interaction paradigms that accentuated and supported the round smart watch.
Visual Design
The new smart watch OS included a set of native watch apps such as messages, phone, email, health, calendar and more. A custom set of icons were designed to create a color coded native app environment for easy use and recognition. A flat modern UI design aesthetic supports the modern style of the physical watch.
