To begin our project, we did a discovery workshop to work on an idea for our smartwatch UI. I began mindmapping ‘money’ as a concept, but I realised that there wasn’t many ideas in terms of a watch UI so instead I switched to ‘education’.
Looking at education, I was able to come up with many more ideas and were able to connect many of them by finding alogical connections. I then narrowed these ideas down to a select few which I believed had the potential for a great UI design.
I was intrigued by the idea of using a smartwatch to teach younger kids something, as this is not typically the use of a smartwatch. Some of my ideas were teaching to tell the time, learn ABC’s or to help a young person track their emotions.
Telling the Time : taking the original concept of a watch as a method of telling the time, teaching young people how to read 12 hour clock or 24 hour written time.
Learning ABC’s : using objects that young people already know and associating the first letter to that object, for example A = Apple and so on.
Tracking Emotions : a way for young people to identify how they are feeling and have a way to express this - for example, a lot of children will not openly admit that they are tired.
Before drawing up any wireframes for my ideas, I had a look through my Apple watch at different screens, how they were effectively laid out, what sizes of icons work and which text I maybe cannot read so well. It was hard to take pictures of this but I can always reference back to the watch itself when it comes to creating my own designs.
One idea I had was using an animal, in this case an octopus, to help tell the time. I used the octopus legs to hold on to the arms of the clock to tell the time. Another feature that could be added is by clicking on the octopus it could tell you the time aloud and in different layouts - e.g. 12 hour clock using am and pm or else the 24 hour clock.
I found that the easiest way to display this would be to add the octopus into the middle of the watch face to maximise space rather than below as then it would not be legible.
