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Unfortunately, the screen doesn't automatically come on when alerts come in, unless it's a calendar event reminder, so you'll have to lift your wrist or press the button on the side to turn the screen on. With splash, water and dust resistance, iPhone 7 32GB is ready when you are. Main Screen. Web browser. Generic software version. The users had to switch too much between the Watch and phone; for example, we had one tutorial animation explaining the Watch interaction on the phone.
Our heart sensor could measure manually as well as continuously. Manual is straightforward, but how could people activate continuous measurement? How could we optimize power consumption?
This was pretty complex, so we decided to make a manual Heart Rate a dedicated function — tap to get a result. To preserve battery, we only used continuous measurement while the Workout mode was active.
Originally I was thinking of upcoming hourly data for the main weather screen, but it looked pretty complex and not visually appealing enough. Finally we decided to have a special background image for each weather and time of the day: morning, day, evening, night. Unexpectedly, weather raised more questions than any other function. We had to get the location in a simple way without bothering the user with GPS permissions, to figure out how often it would update and how to display the latest update time and what would happen if there was no internet connection.
The back end logic behind weather turned out pretty sophisticated.
Another complicated UX problem was music player control. We explored two options:.
Tracker device and app do not support Bluetooth location method. Signed contract with mobile company for two years, big mistake How they can sell such a bad product, shame on You Alcatel Goo. Device is malfunctioning from day one. Track the exact location of Alcatel One Touch N devices with LocationOf in real-time. See up-to-date results on the map every two seconds using GPS.
We went with the second option since it was more minimalistic and looked more appealing. These were:. Another reason to keep the design as simple as possible. As the watch face is the default screen, it has to inform of all important events at first glance. If you have missed notifications, you will see notifications icon and missed call s icon right on the watch face. If you left a function without stopping it i. When you turn on the screen, you see the battery icon. If the battery level is normal, the icon disappears to reduce clutter, if the level is critical, it will stay.
To inform the battery level more efficiently, the watch displays a modal view with a big battery indicator when the level is critical. The same happens when the watch is fully charged.
Also we found it useful to show the same notification on your phone optionally. To keep things intuitive for the user, all three faces use the same layout.
An added bonus was that this saved time for the engineers and allowed them to focus on other critical tasks. I played with minimalistic designs without gradients, textures, shadows and other real world elements. This worked well with the black background, which made the screen borders invisible on black watch. We allowed users to use both preinstalled and custom wallpapers with all watch faces.
The watch face would be white to not interfere with wallpaper colors. Here are some wallpapers that can be installed from the Onetouch Move app:. For the watch, we show the face by default. But if a function is running in the background, what should we display?
Does the user want to see the time or control his music? After quite a debate, we defined several options:. Finally, we created a pretty sophisticated logic table for each function; if the watch is activated during a limited period of time, we show the function.
After a longer time, it resets and shows the watch face. Additionally, I added a quick way to see the time; press and hold the front button to see a semitransparent layer with the time. You can find the original size 53 million thousand pixels of the diagram on my dribbble. Alcatel Watch had to support languages such as Chinese and Japanese, with its vast amount of characters, this and limited memory meant we could use only one font size for the full character set. After playing around with many font sizes, I chose one that was optimal in terms of readability, spacing and visual appeal.
Only for numbers we could increase the font size, as it had a limited character set. For the full character set font we decided to use Droid as it was designed and optimized for low pixel density screens and looked better on the screen. The bigger font used for numbers was Roboto. Another good challenge was to come up with clear but concise text given the lack of screen real estate. Animations were the most anticipated and at the same time painful part of the project.
It was a lot of fun and very insightful to observe how people of different age groups, from different nationalities, with different backgrounds and computer experience used the product we had built and failed some tasks badly. Most of the failed tasks were during the onboarding process. The users had to switch too much between the Watch and phone; for example, we had one tutorial animation explaining the Watch interaction on the phone.
The problem was that users wanted to try it on their Watch and missed critical information, such as how to open notifications or use the back button. We changed the tutorial into a swipeable carousel, with short animations for each new piece of info. This way, the users could immediately try out the instruction on their Watch and proceed at their own pace. Another issue was value proposition.
We entered a screen explaining the benefit of an online account data backup and an online platform. If you dig into user onboarding flows, you might also be interested in my analysis of the Apple Watch. Working on the Alcatel Watch proved a priceless experience, as I learned a lot about manufacturing and designing for hardware. Creating hardware is to define priorities and find a balance between cost, functionality, ease of use, performance, power consumption, size, looks, ergonomics and time to market, constantly pressing the scales to the side with the highest priority.
You also have to shift your mind-set about good design. As a designer you might like trendy minimalist design, but real target audience might think this cutting edge design looks cheap or boring. Obvious interaction schemes to us designers can sometimes cripple inexperienced people. I learned how critical it is to understand the real target consumers. Test your product on real users on different stages of development. The earlier you start, the better. In the end, I believe we did a great job. Special thanks go out to Anthony Sarnes for believing in and hiring me; Dan Dery, Alain Lejeune and Will Dowey for trusting, pushing the team to the limit, their cool ideas and attention to detail; Xu Yi for managing the project; Zhang Li for the software; CW Park for the industrial design; Jingzhi Ding for the Onetouch Move interaction design; Joren Bredman for user testing, language control and his many random initiatives that helped us improve.
If you have any questions, suggestions, or you want to say Hi , find me on dnevozhai. Check out presentation of the project on my Behance portfolio. Please click that nice Heart icon below if you enjoyed this piece :. Sign in. Alcatel Watch UX. Denys Nevozhai Follow. Daily activity tracker A must have function in a smartwatch is an activity tracker. In upcoming generations we plan to include motivational notifications and reminders, more comprehensive data and may be even support for third party applications such as Strava, Runkeeper, MyFitnessPal… Themes Initially we planned to only launch a black watch, but later Alcatel decided to also ship a white version, so we added a white theme to match watch case.
Music player Another complicated UX problem was music player control. Interaction like Soundcloud, which only displayed the track name. Volume could be controlled by either a horizontal slider under the track name or a circular one around the screen edge. These were: analogue with marks and a second dial if roaming in different time zone analogue with hands only digital. Default screen For the watch, we show the face by default. After quite a debate, we defined several options: always display the running function always display the watch face change what to display depending on function display the running function, but add a way to check the time without exiting.
What I have learned Working on the Alcatel Watch proved a priceless experience, as I learned a lot about manufacturing and designing for hardware.