Use cases for smart watches
Whenever a new type of gadget is unleashed upon the world it inevitably faces the question: "what's this for?" This can be hard for gadgets that are in a new form factor, where sometimes living with it for a while is the only way to see how it fits into your life. It’s even harder for new gadgets which are, in part or in whole, software platforms that the gadget vendor is hoping other people will write cool software for. It's hard to imagine using a smartphone without the accompanying cornucopia of apps, but of course the apps came after the phone so on day one consumers didn’t know what was coming.
So it goes for smartwatches. Many people aren't yet sure what they are good for either. Some people have concluded that this means they aren't good for anything -- but I don't believe that to be true.
I have been using an Android Wear smartwatch for the last three months, exploring different software options and possibilities. What follows is a list of the roles I have found it playing in my life -- my use cases, in software engineer jargon. I'm not going to pretend this isn't a very personal list; perhaps none of these things appeal to you, would be a reason for you to desire a smartwatch. But then again, there are surely more use cases I don't care about or haven't found that you do. This is by no means an exhaustive list.
However, note that there are a couple of well-discussed banner features people associate with smartwatches that I'm going to skip over purely because they have already been thoroughly discussed elsewhere: fitness (not only through step counters and heart rate tracking, but also utilities like interval trainers and performance recording like Strava and Runkeeper) and notification triage. What I'm trying to do with this post is point out some less commonly thought of use cases than these.
I know this sounds goofy but hear me out.
Like many people I stopped wearing a watch sometime in the last few years because, hey, I have a phone with me that has the time on; why do I need a watch? Then last summer I went back to wearing a watch again, mostly as a little bit of personal research as the rumours of smartwatches started to build. It turns out that a) wondering what time it is is something that happens to me many times a day and b) glancing at my wrist is noticeably more efficient for answering that question than pulling a phone out of my pocket. Just putting a watch back on my wrist -- any watch -- was an unexpected win.
But for smartwatches, there are also novelty watchfaces like the Frank Underwood one I'm rocking at the moment. Yes, this is definitely goofy, and not the sort of thing tech bloggers talk about very much. But quite a lot of people like goofy stuff. Some 90% of people put their smartphone in a case and I think that's as much about personalisation and customisation as it is about protection. Similarly to changing your phone's look by snapping on a cover, there's something quite satisfying about being able to change your watchface with a few taps to any design you like. On Android, WatchMaker is a smartphone app that allows drag-and-drop design and online sharing of watchfaces; I expect to see something similar for the Apple Watch in the fullness of time.
Smartphones suck for walking directions. Pulling your phone out of your pocket every few minutes to check your route introduces far too many opportunities to drop it four feet onto unyielding pavement for my liking, and staring at it while walking makes you look like an idiot and, again, makes you vulnerable to dropping it if someone barges past you. I'm also uncomfortably aware of the risk of it being grabbed by an opportunistic thief.
Smartwatches, in contrast, are just about perfect. Walking directions only need a line of text anyway -- "turn left" or "turn right", a street name, and a distance -- so the limited screen space is no problem. They're strapped to your wrist and hence impossible to drop. They can vibrate as you approach a turning, so you don't need to watch them closely as you walk for fear of missing a direction. And they can be discreetly checked whenever you want to confirm you're on the right track.
Admittedly, if you live in the suburb of car-centric American town, you probably don't spend a lot of time walking to new places. On the other hand, I live in London, a staggeringly complex city I navigate (like most people) by a combination of public transport and lots of walking. I am constantly in need of directions and so this is a key use case for me.
Cooking presents several opportunities for smartwatch use. I've come to rely on mine for unit conversion via voice commands when working to crazy American recipes with their antiquated systems of weights and measures. Setting and checking timers is another example, and means I can leave the kitchen while something bakes without being at risk of missing the alarm. Usefully, most smartwatches are waterproof, so getting them gunked up with food can be addressed by simply rinsing them off.
One thing I haven’t tried out is using a smartwatch for actual recipes. Mostly, this is because I am already heavily committed to a recipe app called Paprika, which doesn’t have any wearable support. I have hundreds of recipes, many with my own notes or unit conversions added, so moving from that ecosystem is hard for me.
However, given the small screen space of wearables, I’m unconvinced traditional recipe presentation can work particularly well. The usual way of breaking a recipe down into “ingredients” and “directions” requires lots of cross-referencing between the two; if the current step says “now add the sugar” I need to go to the ingredients to find out how much sugar. On a smartwatch, that’s going to involve some swiping and scrolling, which will become tiresome quite quickly. I suspect a truly great wearables cookery app will need a bespoke presentation that intermingles the ingredients and directions sections. (For another off-the-wall idea of how to remix traditional recipes, the table based layout on Cooking for Engineers is excellent.)
Have you heard of phantom vibration syndrome? It's where you could swear your phone buzzed in your pocket, but when you fish it out there's nothing there. Almost as annoying: you're busy doing something and feel the vibration start, but have to wait a second to work out if it's just a text message that you can ignore it for now or if it's an incoming call that needs your attention. And of course, any vibration motor strong enough to stand a chance of being felt in your pocket will inevitably make an annoying racket if it buzzes while your phone is on a hard surface.
Wearables can get around this by having vibration motors that are much weaker than those used in a phone yet still able to unambiguously catch your attention by virtue of being positioned on a more sensitive part of your body. They also open up the possibility of using vibration for discreet notifications, rather than an audible tone, even if you carry your phone where you couldn’t feel it vibrate -- most obviously in a purse, but also a jacket outer pocket or briefcase. This may be particularly useful to owners of the very largest smartphones such as the Nexus 6 or iPhone 6 Plus, which can be quite hard to fit in pockets in some clothes.
UK Trains For Wear is a snappily–titled app which does exactly what it says on the tin. Every day, as I walk into Victoria station to catch my first train home, I can glance at my wrist to see which platform I should go to. This has several advantages over the departure boards shown in the station. Firstly, I can look at it as I walk to the station, rather than having to go to the main concourse. And secondly, I can see the next few trains to my destination, which allows me to skip the next one that departs in 90 seconds and instead take the one after that that gives me a leisurely five minutes to walk to the platform. Not all the departure boards show that information so that can be very helpful.
Unlikely many of the use cases I have written about in this piece, this one is hypothetical. I have a vision in my mind of the perfect app but it's not quite technically possible yet.
My wife and I already use a cloud synced shopping list, but grocery shopping is awkward with a phone in your hand because it’s in the way when you’re picking stuff up and putting it in your basket. Putting the list on your smartwatch is an obvious way to address that.
But even if OurGroceries added wearable support scrolling up and down a 20 or 30 item list on my watch's small screen doesn’t strike me as much fun. What is needed, I think, is hyperlocal positioning via in-store Bluetooth beacons so the watch not only knows what store I’m in but also what aisle. Then the list it shows me could be specific to the aisle, and hence be of a manageable length. It could even display directions to the next aisle that has things that I need to pick up in it, so I no longer need to hold the layouts of the four or five supermarkets I regularly visit in my head.
If you have fancy home automation kit, then a smartwatch interface to control your lights or close your blinds might be pretty useful. I don't, although for pure novelty value, I did rig my Christmas tree lights to be controlled from my watch.
Much more useful for me is using a smartwatch as a media remote control. When streaming music to my Sonos or Chromecast systems or Plex video to my TV, my watch has play/pause/next/back/volume controls which are frequently more convenient than reaching for my phone, unlocking it, and loading the appropriate app. This combines particularly well with when I’m listening to music while cooking, when I might have floury or sticky hands and prefer to leave my phone safely in my pocket.
It seems thematically relevant to discuss Foursquare here, as that’s a service that has also struggled to find a definitive use case. My name is Richard and I am a Foursquare user.
It’s not the gamification that was the original premise of the service, the “I am the mayor of such-and-such” stuff. I found that amusing for about five minutes then quickly became dull. Nor is it the recommendations bit; I don’t have enough friends on Foursquare for that to eclipse the likes of Google Maps, Yelp, or UrbanSpoon when it comes time to find somewhere to eat. My personal killer app to stick with Foursquare is actually nothing to do with Foursquare itself: it’s a journalling app called Momento.
Momento pulls down into a single searchable archive a variety of your online activities, including Facebook posts, tweets, and Foursquare checkins. This turns out to be surprisingly useful for answering vague questions like “what was that Mexican restaurant we went to last January? Or was it February?” Now, that’s not something I need to do very often, but it’s useful enough often enough to justify the modest effort of a Foursquare checkin: pick up phone, unlock phone, load app, select place, hit the button.
This modest effort becomes even easier if you do it from your wrist. The official Foursquare apps have no wearables support, but there’s a third party app called Wear for Swarm for Android that does the trick nicely. A few discreet taps at my wrist and I’m checked in, without being That Guy who’s fiddling with his phone.
Most of the use cases I have talked about in this post are generic and can apply to any smartwatch, but this one is specific to Android. Smart Lock allows you to add an unlock pattern or passphrase to your phone, but automatically bypass that lock whenever it’s within range of your smartwatch. If you drop your phone or it is stolen, then the passphrase kicks in to protect your data; but as long as it remains on your person, it should never bother you. Many people find this a more acceptable trade-off between convenience and security than entering an unlock pattern every time they use their phone.
To reverse the last case this one is specific to the Apple Watch, because it will support Apple Pay. Here in the UK, where we long ago abandoned signatures for card transactions and contactless cards are fairly common, using an iPhone for Apple Pay is less compelling than in the US. The convenience of pulling a phone out of a pocket and holding it against a reader for a second isn’t significantly greater than pulling a card out and holding that against a reader for a second. But with an Apple Watch, you don’t need to get anything out of your pocket at all -- you simply brush your wrist against the reader.
Apple Pay remains resolutely US-only for now, but it seems safe to assume worldwide expansion will come in time.
At risk of outrageous post-Singularity pretension, I believe that over the last decade smartphones have gradually become our exobrains; tiny slivers of our consciousness that exist outside our bodies. They're where we put boring things we need refer to but don't want to have to remember, like phone numbers and appointment details and map directions. As this trend grows, we also see a shift in usage patterns; away from strict store-and-look-up like a '90s PDA and towards the-smartphone-tells-you-what-it-thinks-you-need-to-know like Google Now. Information is pushed rather than pulled. I think this is why people feel so bereft when they don't have their phones. A tiny piece of them is missing.
This model is hampered, however, by the physicality of smartphones: their finite battery life, droppable chassis, imperfect means of catching our attention, and (often) needing two hands to operate. When you’re sat in a chair or standing still, and capable of giving all your attention to the phone, that’s not a problem. That’s why so many of the use cases I have found wearables useful for are focussed on those times when I am walking around, or trying to do something else with my hands, or trying to concentrate on some other task; these are the times when there’s a friction to holding and using a smartphone.
This, to my mind, is the opportunity for wearables: to reduce that friction. To more gracefully integrate our smartphone's brains into our lives. I sincerely hope that this is one tech that will flourish and grow.
