How Google Stealthily prepared customers For a brand new Smartwatch UI

with the intention to add new functionality to Android wear smartwatches, Google first had to take a few of it away.

August 31, 2015 a traditional watch face is the logical homescreen for any smartwatch. in any case, we’ve worn watches namely to look on the time for over 100 years. however thus far, Apple and Google have principally leveraged the smartwatch face as a method of self-expression to add stylistic selection slightly than extra functionality—all the while hiding more functional features deeper within the OS.

So when Google announced that Android wear watches might beef up interactive watch faces—complete with their very own app-driven problems (you realize issues as those further tickers with alarms, dates, and chronographs)—it simply made feel. Working with Google, design studio UsTwo launched an Android smartwatch face that simplest features the time in a tiny window in the middle. around it, the circular dial previews things like e mail, climate, and steps walked. And in the event you faucet on any of those bits of data, you’ll notice that they’re if truth be told buttons that can deliver you .

Brett Lider, design lead on the Android wear platform, tells me that the crew had been focused on these interactive watch faces considering model 1.1, however they’re most effective now just introducing the feature in v1.3 as a result of they have been already the usage of the tap gesture to do one thing else: pulling up Android wear’s card stream—a group of notifications and Google Now updates.

“What we checked out was once, the most important of direct manipulation should apply [in watch faces], because users would reasonably want to start tapping on the ideas they’re seeing,” Lider says. “originally with Android wear, we had direct manipulation to get into the assistant area . . . what we did over a number of updates was once, provide the interactions again to the watch face.”

The staff would slowly phase out tapping on the main reveal by way of providing alternatives, most effective to reintroduce tapping as a brand new gesture when Google presented their smart watchfaces. So in Android put on 1.2, the team delivered two new gestures for users to succeed in the card circulation: The swipe and the lengthy press.

“Tapping on the watch face nonetheless worked, however it used to be just a little of a chess game,” Lider says. “We put some items on the board the place swipe and lengthy press would get you to the assistant area, so we could supply tap to the watch face for utility.”

With these new choices, they were seeking to invisibly ween customers from tapping. To beef up the brand new addiction, in addition they delivered an animation to give a boost to the transition: should you say “k Google,” the assistant flies in from the proper edge of the reveal to subconsciously cue you to swipe.

Then in 1.three, the crew lower the tap-to-assistant gesture altogether—the final step in erasing tapping from consumer reminiscences—sooner than repurposing the gesture for tapping the buttons on watch faces. the good thing about shifting so slowly? As Lider puts it, “no one neglected the previous way.”

“i would say, we’re always looking towards the long run, and occasionally, accurately, it takes time to conform things towards the future you envision,” Lider says. “As designers, we’re constantly agitating, and are pissed off with where we are lately, because we see the longer term coming, and wish to get there as quickly as possible.”