Product Design – My first week with an Apple Watch

I’m an Apple enthusiast, the Apple watch was one of the most important releases I was waiting for. After the first week with it, I feel confident enough to drop some lines about my experience as a user.

I love wearable devices and I truly believe that they are the next step in the internet evolution. My previous wrist experience with such devices was with a Nike FuelBand. The Apple watch is my first smart watch. As a UX designer my feedback is given within such framework.

What I like:

1. The Call Experience. It’s a dream that comes true! You can call people just talking at your wrist. I felt like Michael Knight calling my Supercar. The quality of the voice it’s good and you can talk even with your wrist away from your mouth. Be careful because the privacy is not guaranteed!
2. The Maps app experience is awesome! Walking with this app on is a great experience. Your watch will alert you (with the haptic intensity) when you’ve to turn or if you take the wrong way and so on. The trigger is absolute friendly and you just have to turn your wrist to check distance and directions;
3. The Workout app experience is great! This is one of the user cases where you can use your watch without the smartphone. It’s a good experience in terms of gestures during the workout. I tried it during a Pilates session and during the military training. At the end it’s easy to read what you’ve done during your training in terms of calories for instance;
4. The Siri experience is friendlier than on the smartphone. I like the feature that allows you to ask something to Siri just rotating your wrist;
5. The Power Reserve. I love this feature, it makes sense to have it on such device. It’s very easy to activate it from the watch and you will be able to have some basic features on your wrist. Would be great to have something like that on my iPhone and give me the capacity to perform basic tasks with my charge leftovers;
6. The Glances feature. It’s a cool feature to customize the Apple Watch. With Glances the engagement is high and the user is in control. I found that the user experience to manage this feature from the iPhone is well designed;
7. The Charger. In terms of product design is awesome, as usual Apple products are simply brilliant. Remembers to me the doctor stethoscopes. It’s very easy to manage and if you connect the cable to your Mac (or pc) via USB it’s very cool to have the Apple watch on your desk while is charging.

What I don’t like:

1. It’s an iPhone extension, it’s not possible to figure out a possible user case without the smartphone;
2. The battery life is not enough, at the end of the day you’ll have another device to charge, another charger to remind when you travel and you’ll struggle to find a free plug;
3. The notification system is a cognitive overload, when your watch will shake your wrist you’ll be focused on what will happen on the small screen viagra online apotheke. Extra work, extra effort! For instance you’ve to take care of the notifications on the Apple watch from iMessage and the notifications on the phone from Whatsapp;
4. The clock customization is not so intuitive. The learning curve in terms of how to manage the clock screen is quite high (I’m the guy that is not used to reading instructions) even for an Apple user. The firmly gesture is something new that we don’t have on our iPhone. For the user is not easy to understand the right sequence to achieve this task;
5. The side button is designed to show and/or hide friends and to pay. In my opinion, this is too weak and a Apple watch physical button can perform other tasks or can be used in the preferences as a shortcut;
6. The notification icon. As I said I’m not the instruction guide guy. When I saw for the first time this red dot on my Apple watch I was sure that something was wrong with my device. Maybe lack of connection, maybe lack of battery but for sure I didn’t think about a new notification. Why to design such icon in red? In the current iPhone iPad UI we don’t have any UI element in such shape/color;

Conclusions:

The Apple watch is definitely a nice gadget. Is an Apple product, so if you like stuff from Cupertino you’ll definitely love it. If you’re not an Apple fan you’ll probably find out that this device is nothing special. My impression is that the Apple watch is not something that is going to change our life. It’s a step forward to decrease the gap between us and the wearable devices. Right now, from my side, there are too many constraints to allow this device to be a prominent part of our lives like the iPhone.

Resources:

• Apple Watch support community: https://discussions.apple.com/community/watch/using_apple_watch;