My first project brief this semester is to produce a smartwatch app. The project brief outlines that we should create three screens for a smartwatch app of any genre, from fitness to finances. It places an emphasis on various forms of content that we should consider and aim to include, listing text, icons, colour, images and video as having a particular importance.
The project outcomes of this project are clearly outlined, which is useful for this early stage of planning as I’m aware of what I should be aiming to produce over the following weeks. The requirements are as follows:
During my induction session, we were given the brief for this project and asked to complete competitor analysis of smartwatch apps for the following week. Honestly, I was slightly surprised to already be faced with a project as it was only our induction session, however, I feel that this was useful to motivate me to begin working early on as I understand that there will be quite the jump in workload this year in comparison to first year.
Our first task’s objective is to analyse key competitor smartwatch apps, identifying their key features, user experience and marketing strategies, aiming to inform improvements and differentiation for the app that I will produce. This is a very useful first step for generating ideas for my project, as I’m yet to know what kind of app I’d like to produce, so seeing the strengths and weaknesses of competing apps will be beneficial for understanding what users may and may not benefit from. I decided that as I’m still not sure what I’d like my app to focus on, I studied apps from multiple different categories.
Strava is a digital fitness app, designed for tracking exercise such as running and cycling. It originally launched as a website in 2009 before moving to an app in 2011 where it eventually soared to one of the most recognised and successful fitness apps on the market.
Strava’s smartwatch version launched over ten years ago in 2015 following the release of the Apple Watch earlier the same year. Since then, it has faced several redesigns and improvements to focus on being user friendly with high usability at such a compact size.
The design of Strava is very simple and follows a similar design structure to that of many smartwatch apps. In fact, at this point I noticed that almost all smartwatch apps use ‘dark mode’. There are a range of reasons for this design choice, most notably to save battery life and have better legability without looking too bright in dark settings. I will keep this in mind for my own app, as this is an aspect of user experience that has already been explored by many companies and concluded the approach that is more suited. Furthermore, the dark background helps the different colours in the UI to stand out more. Strava has used colours effectively as a way of communicating with the user, as of coursed there isn’t as much room for written communication as there is in the majority of app interfaces. This is clear in the above example; green is used to communicate success when the user achieves a goal or makes improvements, yellow is used to show an award and red is reserves for the more fact-heavy, health based screen. The choice of colours here also plays into accessibility, they are vibrant and stand out much more than if muted/dull colours had been used.
In terms of the typography, there is very little information on each screen, due to the compact size. This shows consideration for user experience, as if more written information had been compacted onto the screen or the text has been made smaller, it would be much more difficult to use. A sans-serif font has been used with frequent fonts texts to maximise usability as such a small size.
A little user-research on forums and reviews showed me that there are quite a few user complaints about Strava’s smartwatch app interface, however. For example, some user statesthat the option to save and delete a workout progress are on the same screen, which leads to many people accidentally deleting workouts. Furthermore, many users point out that the smartwatch version has potential for may features that could make it a much better experience, such as elevation information, trail alerts and more.
In terms of updates, the smartwatch version receives semi-frequent updates. However, the most recent update was 8 months ago and a range of user complaints have arisen since, so it could benefit from more frequent updates.
Todoist is one of the widest recognised apps for productivity, with 55+ million sign ups across its different versions and over 20k ratings the Apple Store, with an average rating of an impressive 4.8. It was first brought to smartwatches in 2014 on the Android Wear, followed by a release for the Apple Watch in 2015.
