Designing for a small screen
I was on the team that developed and maintained the DTE Energy app. I was only one of several designers that rotated in and out of the project. I was working on it when Apple released the first Apple Watch and so I decided to design a watch version of the app as a way to learn the WatchOS patterns and interactions. It was also a great excuse to buy an Apple Watch ;)
No only did it prove to be a great learning experience, but InVision asked me to write a blog post about my experience and process. You can see the whole writeup here on the InVision blog.
It always starts with sketches. Even if they're tiny.
I have realized over the years that you can save yourself sooo much time if you work in paper and pencil as long as possible. Fast, loose sketches keep you from becoming entangled with a design and let you experiment quickly. Even if you realize you don't like what you've created, you can easily move on without feeling like you've wasted too much time.
As with every app, I mapped out the flows and identified the tasks that the user needed to accomplish. The real challenge then was adapting them to the watch interface using the interactions and patterns that are unique to the watch. I dropped some features that were present on the iPhone app because they just had no context on the watch. Interacting with an outage map, for instance, was just not a good experience on the watch. But being able to see the status of your power or that your bill had been paid were great glances.
It was fun iterating through "at-a-glance" ideas. I experimented with presenting the data from the app in new ways on the watch. Now that I had the flows and had done some prototyping with InVision I designed all of the rest of the screens. Alerts and glances are a big part of a watch app.
Devices and frameworks change so quickly now that you have to be willing to pivot and adapt on a daily basis. The design is only half of the challenge. The other half, the invisible half, is the true "user experience" which is platform awareness (iOS vs Android vs Desktop vs wearables) and data presentation in an appropriate and relevant manner. I hope you'll check out the blog post, it's not too long and it's full of relevant information. Thanks!
