Designing for wearables: a retrospective

I graduated from my Masters' degree in Interaction Design in July 2015. That year, as part of my studies, I created a mobile app with a wearable companion designed for one of the first smart watches on the market.

To put this into perspective - Apple Watch was first release in April of 2015. It feels like we've had smart watches forever, but it's actually less than a decade (well, if you read this before 2025!)

The project was an app designed to help you budget your expenses. The mobile side of the app was pretty complex - with standard charts and summaries to help users understand how much they were spending, and the wearable side of the app had ways to record expenses "where you were" with the idea that knowing where you spend money will help you budget better.

Here are some screenshots of the app and smart watch design I extracted from my research paper submission at the time. The app was called "awear":

Comparing the work I did on awear with what's on the market now wouldn't be fair. But it definitely was a good eye opener at the time into how ubiquitous these technologies would become.

In 2015, the watch I used to test the app on was a Motorola - the Moto 360. I had it shipped from the US just for this, and it had a huge impact on the people that tested it. It was new, and shiny. It was lightweight enough that you could wear it and not feel completely weird about having a screen on your wrist. The battery in it wouldn't last half a day, so all in all it was pretty useless as a watch. But it showed me, and all the users that tested the app, that it was indeed possible to wear useful tech.

Almost a decade later and we're still sometimes amazed at what wearable tech can do. Even though the technology itself has evolved (watches last entired days, if not weeks now), the interactions we have with them are still pretty minimal. Some of the findings from user interviews back then were how they felt like people would be staring when they used the app on their watch - and how the interactions should be minimised to feel less "awkward" in public. I'm not sure this has changed much, it still feels a bit odd to see people interact only with their watches - to take phone calls for example. It's still some sort of a sci-fi-esque behaviour. I wonder what it would take for us to adjust to these kind of ubiquitous technologies.

There's something about wearing a piece of tech that just goes a bit beyond just having a phone or other device we can leave behind. When you wear something, that something is with you wherever you go. And interacting with something that's in an unexpected place - like a wrist, is a pretty significant behaviour shift.

As I look back at the work we did and where we are now, I am excited to see we're heading towards a future where these kind of devices will become more and more mainstream and we will all just accept these new ways of interacting with tech.