Interviews: GDEs

E John Feig

How do you imagine the future of the wearables?

I’m excited about the future of wearables. Mostly, because we still have not found the killer app yet. Notifications are a great use case, but I’m not sure that it’s the killer app. The killer app for wearables is something that’s going to be similar to real-time navigation on smartphones. It is going to push wearables into a place where it makes sense to the average consumer. Right now, they’re great toys, and lots of fun to play with. Where they need to get to is something that delivers enough value to justify both the cost of the device, but also encourages people to keep wearing them. The best part is that whoever figures this out, and delivers the killer app, is quickly going to be running a billion dollar business.

Could you tell us how different is designing an app for wearables and what you consider as the biggest challenge?

First and foremost, you should try to have very, very quick interactions, as short and simple as possible. There’s a 5-second rule that shows up in Google’s documentation for Android Wear, and that is that if you force the user to interact with you on a watch for more than five seconds, they might as well have pulled out their phone. Limit the amount of information that you’re trying to deliver to the user. You’re either going to be action based or notification based. If you’re action based, it should be one action per command. If you have lots of things that you can do, use multiple actions. Contextually aware apps are going to do the best here, and you have access to the most context on a wearable.

Dan Lew

Giant companies like Google invest a lot in making the “perfect” UI and UX. Why are they so important?

Many developers emulate the UX of the most popular apps on Android, so it’s especially important for Google’s apps (which come pre-installed on most devices) to get it right. Google’s offerings act as both a flagship applications on Android but also demonstrate to other developers what good UI/UX is.