The Apple Watch has the hallmarks of a great Apple product. The hardware is striking. The software is simple. It has all sorts of smart new functionality, like monitoring your heart rate during workouts and letting you effortlessly pay for stuff without reaching for your wallet.But perhaps the most interesting thing about the watch, when you compare it to Apple’s past products, is its user interface. There isn’t just one way of using it. There are several. You can operate the watch by spinning a dial on its side, or touching its screen, or simply talking to the thing. One of the big challenges with a smartwatch is figuring out how to make it useful in all sorts of different situations. Apple’s solution? Give people all sorts of different ways of using it.The medley of interactions that power Apple’s new watch are undeniably impressive. But what’s still unclear is what it all amounts to. By designing a watch that does it all, Apple avoids answering the single toughest question surrounding this intriguing new type of device: What are these things truly good for?
Three Great UI Innovations
As Tim Cook mentioned on stage at the watch’s debut, new products often demand new interfaces, and over the years Apple’s been phenomenally successful at developing them. It brought the graphical user interface to the masses with the Macintosh. It gave us the joys of the iPod scroll wheel. It pioneered the multitouch interface that drives so many of our mobile devices today. When it comes to dictating how we interact with technology, no company has a better record.
The Apple Watch is no exception. It’s built on a number of thoughtful, elegant user interface ideas that pack an astounding amount of functionality into a tiny, attractive package.
The watch’s “digital crown” in action
First is the digital crown, the small dial that sits on the side of the watch. It handles the bulk of the navigation. Spinning the crown moves you across your home screen, scrolls through lists and menus, and zooms around maps—all, crucially, without forcing you to obscure the watch’s display with your fingers.
Though the Apple Watch screen is touch sensitive, the presentation made it clear that Apple sees the digital crown as device’s most innovative input solution. And it is a brilliant approach, taking a timepiece mechanism we’re all familiar with and imbuing it with new functionality. Its simplicity is reminiscent of the iPod’s scroll wheel, and it’s no surprise that Kevin Lynch, the former Adobe VP who headed the development of the Apple Watch software, reportedly worked with a group of iPod engineers on the project.
In addition to the digital crown, the watch has a touch screen. But the screen contains an interesting innovation of its own. It’s force sensitive, meaning it can distinguish between different types of presses. Tapping a song title in your music app, for example, might let you play that song as usual. But pressing and holding could summon a menu of other options, perhaps allowing you to control music on another device, or beam your watch’s playlist wirelessly to other speakers. The force-sensitive screen effectively doubles the device’s real estate, hiding a context-aware menu beneath the visible UI without resorting to any added buttons or navigational chrome.
The Apple Watch’s third big user interface development isn’t visible at all. It’s the so-called Taptic Engine that drives the watch’s haptic feedback. Think of it like the “vibrate” function on your phone, just tuned for a watch. Calls and texts won’t announce themselves by shaking your wrist like mad. Instead, you’ll just feel a gentle buzz, imperceptible to anyone around you. The notification is revealed only when you lift your wrist up to look at the screen.
Haptic feedback means notifications are totally discreet.
More interesting than any single one of these is the way they all share the burden of interaction on the device. There’s no single way to control the Apple Watch. It’s not just a scroll wheel, it’s not just a touchscreen, it’s not just haptics, it’s not just Siri. The Apple Watch might be the most constrained device the company’s ever had to design for, and somehow it ended up creating its most varied and robust interface yet.
But all of that is just “how it works.” That’s a very separate matter from “what it is.” And it’s there that the Apple Watch starts to lose some focus.
The Bigger Question: What Should It Do?
Part of Apple’s magic, at least in recent years, has come from its discipline. Apple doesn’t make stuff simply to make stuff. It doesn’t add features just to add them. As the company’s explained again and again, its design process isn’t one of addition but rather subtraction. Here’s Jony discussing the development of the original iPod in the New York Times Magazine in 2003.
Steve…made some very interesting observations very early on about how this was about navigating content….It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device — which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren’t obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff.
In the iPod’s case, the “what it is” was given: It was a music player. The scroll wheel was the brilliant solution to “how it works.”
Apple cleverly re purposed the traditional watch crown for navigation.
Looking at the watch, the digital crown and force-sensitive touch screen cleverly address the challenge of navigating content much in the way of the iPod’s scroll wheel. But that presupposes that the watch is “about” navigating content in the first place. It assumes a maximalist approach to functionality on the wrist.
Now, surely some of people anticipating Apple’s watch were looking for just what the company delivered—a watch that does more than the other smartphone-connected watches we’ve seen and looks better doing it. But those waiting to see Apple’s discipline brought to bear on a new, uncertain product category—those eager for Apple show us not just what we need but what we don’t need in a smartwatch—were left wanting.
Instead, there was a sense that the watch is a compilation of features in a way that Apple products rarely are. Sure, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world as a hybrid beast itself—it’s an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator all in one!—but each of those was a slam dunk use case. The Apple Watch is a fitness device, convincingly. It is a watch, convincingly. It is also…a way to send tiny disappearing drawings to friends? A thing for looking at next week’s lunar calendar? A beacon for alerting you when you walk by stuff you’ve pinned on Pinterest? The Apple Watch is so many things that Tim Cook didn’t even have time to list them all, though he did blurt out a few more as he was heading off stage: It’s a viewfinder for your iPhone camera. A remote for your Apple TV. A walkie-talkie.
There’s no fundamental problem with gadgets doing many things. Our smartphones would be useful if they were just phones, music players, and internet communicators, but it’s all the other stuff that makes them truly indispensable.
But what’s missing amidst the Apple Watch’s litany of features is any sense of the restraint that has guided Apple’s products in the past. There’s no suggestion that Apple has cracked what these weird watch things are really all about. The watch seemed like a perfect opportunity to do less. Instead, Apple seemingly just threw up their hands and did it all.
The approach raises some serious questions. Looking at a tiny map on your watch might be incrementally more convenient than doing so on your phone, but is that utility enough to warrant the watch’s power-hungry screen, which necessitates charging the device every night instead of every week? Using the crown to scroll through content is smart, but at a point where we’re all straining to keep up with the daily tidal wave of content as it is, do we really want to be doing any more scrolling in the first place? Do we honestly need a watch with a home screen full of apps, even if they take the form of a cool bubbly cluster instead of a boring grid?
All along, there’s been the vague promise that these new wearable devices would free us from fiddling with our phones. It’s possible that the Apple Watch, with its smart, multifaceted user interface, could do that. But watching Tim Cook and friends introduce their new toy to the world, showing off its animated solar system clock and its customizable emoji, one was forced to acknowledge another, more ignominious fate for the Apple Watch. It could end up just being another thing to fiddle with.
Eshwar Chaitanya 