My contribution:
🟡 Collaborated on the watch's initial design, focusing on button positioning, until Steve Jarvis (Timex, Nike) refined its final industrial design.
🟡 Established the UI navigation for both Meridian (rectangular screen) and Luna (round screen) models. Designed core watch-faces and apps, overseeing the OS development with a team of 4 firmware engineers.
🟡 Crafted the mobile experience for iOS, Android & Windows Phone companion apps, where users manage app faces, downloads, steps, and notifications.
🟡 Played a pivotal role in the Watchmaker platform pre-Fitbit acquisition.
The main initial value proposition for the product was a very long lasting battery life.
At that point in time, this could only have been done by using a monochrome screen and low energy electronics & protocols.
Building an operating system for the watch that could fine-tune the energy usage for each specific use-case was also a very important puzzle piece and turned out to be an important selling point when Vector was subsequently acquired by Fitbit...
Starting off with the initial ethos of the startup and then laying out all our constraints (including manufacturing, budgeting, time to market) was critical in helping Steve and I articulate our initial design values.
For a while the "design team" consisted of Steve Jarvis leading industrial design & brand and myself leading the digital design of the watch & mobile apps.
These initial design values helped me and subsequently the other designers that came in later on, navigate important design decisions and gave me the confidence I was on the right track when experimenting with new ideas.
As the product evolved over the course of 2.5 years, these initial values evolved to be more actionable as they needed to distill the overall product initiatives of a more mature company.
The cost and various manufacturing and sourcing constraints essentially dictated the amount of resolution that I had at hand when exploring the operating system’s (Vector OS) UI and navigation.
Users would have 3 buttons to interact with directly, no touch screen interactions and a screen resolution that came in either at 300x300 pixels for the round screen (Luna model) or 250x200 for the rectangular screen (Meridian model).
Importantly, both of the screen lacked anti-alliasing so smooth edges and rounded corners were dreams.
An advantage though was that natively the screens were always-on (similar to an e-ink display but without the awful refresh rates), so this actually helped in creating a more natural looking device, that could tell time without needing to light up the screen and thus consume more energy.
Users could only click on the side buttons to navigate. Taping the middle button would open a nested list, either long pressing or double pressing the middle button would take you back.
Up/Down buttons would let the users navigate inside the lists.
The watch could, among others things, receive notifications from a teathered phone.
Users were able to filter what types of the notifications to receive on their wrists by going to the companion app (design value: “Filter & Simplify).
Notifications and alerts coming in from your phone would always be “on top”. When receiving a notifications you could discreetly view it and after 6 seconds it would go in the notification ring (see next section).
Tapping on the middle button when the notification ring was displayed would open the unread or undismissed notifications.
Vector OS would support either watchfaces or apps. Apps were more complex but followed the same expand and list navigation principles.
Unread notifications are displayed discreetly as a thin circle around the watchface. Pressing the center button always shows the notification.
Streams also let users see important info on the watchface like weather, date and many others, without interacting with the buttons.
When we really zoom in (literally), aligning UI elements on a low resolution screen is less straighfoward than it might seem.
Consider the fact that the OS could not interpret imaginary lines between pixels and use those to center/middle align element.
This meant that all elements needed to use uneven number of pixels for their dimensions. By having an uneven number, there is always a "middle" pixel row or column to use for alignment.
Vector OS would support out of the box the 2 different screen sizes. I thus needed to employ patterns that would work for both screen sizes and specify exactly when display patterns needed to diverge.
One of the earliest challenges was around displaying blocks of text from notifications.
On a rectangular screen, threads that required scrolling would not present and issue, as this was something users are used to, but on a round screen, text would get cut and sometimes difficult to follow so instead of continuous scrolling, I experimented with vertical paging.
In general though, on the Luna model, center aligning elements seemed to result in more solid designs.
The OS then was set to know that, as a general rule, a centered text on Luna should adapt to become left aligned on Meridian, with some exceptions.
At this point, technically, everything we were building for the watch was an app. Watchfaces included. Both the engineering team and the designers had accumulated a lot of knowledge on how to create tiny complex applications on the watch that consumed little energy and had solid patters.
We had put a series of best practices in place and after building a first batch of 1st party watchfaces & wearable apps, we opened up the platfom to users.
Initially, the platform, through the mobile apps, allowed users to create custom watchfaces. Eventually we had built enough frameworks and levels of abstraction to allow users with very basic coding experience to build utility apps for the watch.
Vector was becoming less about building a smartwatch and more about growing a B2C wearables ecosystem.
⌚️ -> ☁️
1. A software company.
2. That is building wearable products powered by a solid wearable apps platform and mobile companion app experience.
3. That aims to help users stay motivated with their fitness goals and simplify their digital interactions.
In the vesion delivered to users the watch came with 10 pre-installed apps (as much as local storage would allow).
Users would change watchfaces and utility apps from the iOS and Android companion apps but they had to adapt to the 10 slots available. Installing new watchfaces or apps on the watch was virtually instant thanks to the in-house communication protocol built from scratch on bluetooth low energy technology.
You can see here an example of a utility app experience, the Tracker app, that would allow users to record running, speed walking or cycling sessions, before auto-detection was available.
The watch could actually be used out of the box without it being connected to a mobile phone. But, it could only tell time, had 1 watchface to choose from and had 1 app that could be used without a tethered phone: a chronometer.
The iOS and Android companion mobile apps elevated the watch experience to an ecosystem experience.
