“Your brief is to design three screens for a smart watch app. This could be to manage fitness, water intake, payments, children tracker… or future?”
As someone who does not own a smart watch, admittedly I was a bit uneasy when reading the brief. The first thought that entered my head was, “I’ve never used an apple watch, so how on earth am I supposed to design for one?”. However, rationale soon kicked in and I realised that’s the exciting part of working in this industry. I will be faced with many projects, dealing with technology I know little to nothing about. It’s an exciting prospect to learn about a device I have never used, understand it’s functions and interactions, and utilise this knowledge to design content for it.
<aside> ⭐ REFLECTION: The brief is pretty open ended, which means I have free reign to develop this project in whatever way inspires me. I definitely want to take a user-centric approach in my ideation, in order to create a product that solves a problem, taking inspiration from user-centric design principles such as Winter’s ‘Content Design’.
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I felt it was integral to form a basic understanding of the basic gestures, interactions and hardware of an apple watch. I created a research page which I can refer back to throughout my project which will aid me in creating interfaces which are actually usable for smart watches, mainly based on an apple watch as this device dominates the smart watch market.
Researching gestures and buttons on an Apple Watch
<aside> ⭐ REFLECTION: I’m glad that I did this exercise as it is crucial to understand the technology in which you’re designing for. This familiarity will set me up nicely for the rest of the project as I will be able to form ideas based around these features.
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