Designing user-centric Apple Watch apps with accessibility in mind
The Apple Watch’s small screen size, need for glanceable content, and technology constraints require designers to think out of the box to ensure a successful user experience. Here’s everything you need to know about how to design apps for Apple Watch that follow Human Interface Guidelines.
Since its introduction in 2015, the Apple Watch has become the most popular smartwatch in the United States.
At first, Apple’s smartwatch was seen as an accessory to the iPhone, but it soon established itself as a distinct product, providing exclusive features for tracking health, communication, and other purposes.
Over time, Apple has improved the device’s abilities by introducing features such as ECG functionality, fall detection, and an always-on display, raising the bar for what wearables can accomplish.
Designing apps for the Apple Watch presents a distinct set of challenges compared to other devices. Its intimate nature and the immediacy with which it delivers information demand a design approach that prioritizes quick, accessible interactions.
Developers and designers must think out of the box to deliver value through every pixel and interaction on the small screen of the Apple Watch while keeping in mind the constraints of glanceable content, battery life, and processing power. Understanding these aspects is crucial to creating applications that enhance user experience and push the boundaries of wearable devices in our daily lives.
Design constraints
Designing for the Apple Watch involves navigating unique constraints that shape how applications are conceived and implemented.
Screen Size
The small screen of the Apple Watch is perhaps the most obvious constraint that impacts the design process. It requires:
- Prioritization of content: Only the most essential information should be visible.
- Legibility: Text and graphics must be clear and easy to read at a glance.
- Simplified interaction: UI elements need to be large enough to interact with easily yet small enough to fit on the display.
Input methods
The primary methods for input on the Apple Watch — touch, the Digital Crown, and voice commands — impose specific considerations for designers:
- Touch: Designers must ensure that touch targets are large enough to be tapped accurately without crowding the interface.
- Digital Crown: Utilizing the crown for scrolling and fine adjustments can enhance usability but requires thoughtful integration into the app’s navigation structure.
- Voice controls: Providing voice interaction options can enhance accessibility and ease of use.
Additionally, the Apple Watch supports four gestures: tap, tap and hold, swipe, and drag.
Battery life
Since the Apple Watch is a device often used throughout the day, preserving battery life is a critical design constraint. Strategies include:
- Efficient use of resources: Keeping animations and data updates to a minimum to conserve power.
- Dark color schemes: Using black backgrounds to take advantage of the OLED screen’s power-saving characteristics when displaying black pixels.
Performance limitations
The Apple Watch does not have the same processing power as a smartphone or computer, which affects app design:
- Simplicity in functionality: Apps need to be streamlined to perform well within the hardware’s capabilities.
- Data handling: When possible, offload data processing to a paired iPhone or the cloud to keep the watch app responsive.
Other considerations
Beyond these fundamental constraints, there are several other factors to keep in mind:
- Complications: These should provide immediate value without frequent updates that drain the battery.
- Notifications: Must be concise and actionable, designed to convey important information within seconds.
- Always on display: Needs to show essential information without compromising privacy or battery life.
Key design principles for Apple Watch
1. Simplicity and minimalism
When designing for the Apple Watch, the principle of simplicity and minimalism takes center stage.
The limited screen space demands a focus on essential content, steering clear of any unnecessary elements that could clutter the interface.
This approach enhances legibility and facilitates easier navigation, allowing users to interact with the app more efficiently.
Effective design on the Apple Watch should guide users swiftly to the information or functionality they need without any distractions.
2. Contextual relevance
Given the device's nature, which is often used on the go, apps must deliver value through quick bursts of interaction that are directly relevant to the user at that moment.
Whether it’s showing upcoming calendar events at the start of the day or timely weather updates before a scheduled run, the app should present data that is immediately applicable to the user’s current context and needs.
3. Glanceability
Glanceability refers to the ability of the app’s content to be quickly and easily understood within mere seconds. This is vital for a device like the Apple Watch, where interactions are typically brief, and users often look for information in a hurry.
An excellent implementation of this principle can be seen in the design of complications on the watch face, which provides essential information like upcoming appointments or weather conditions at a glance, without the need to open an app.
Navigation and layout
As the Apple Watch display has evolved towards larger, more rounded screens, the design team has responded with a flexible grid system to optimize content placement and usability across various watch sizes.
This system supports three foundational layouts:
- Dial-based views are ideal for quickly digestible information. They use full-screen color and imagery to add context while accommodating up to four corner controls without clutter.
- Infographic views are best for data-heavy content like charts and graphs, paired with text and metrics to aid in understanding complex information.
- Lists simplify navigation through content, making them perfect for scrolling with the digital crown and allowing users to browse items comfortably.
These layouts automatically adapt to different Apple Watch sizes supported by watchOS 10, ensuring elements are perfectly aligned and proportional.
Detailed specifications for these layout grids are available in the Apple Design Resources, helping developers create consistent and engaging interfaces regardless of device size.
Pro tip: When designing your content for the Apple Watch, extend it from one edge of the screen to the other and minimize the padding between elements to avoid wasting valuable space.
To ensure a clean and user-friendly interface, don’t overcrowd it with too many controls placed side by side.
As a general rule, no more than three buttons that contain glyphs or two buttons that contain text should be displayed in a row. It is usually best to have text buttons that span the full width of the screen. However, two side-by-side buttons with short text labels can work well, provided the screen does not require scrolling.
Visual Design Aesthetics
The device's small display makes effective use of color and typography very important in Apple Watch design.
Color
When choosing colors, designers should prioritize contrasts that enhance legibility, making content easy to read at a glance.
Dark backgrounds are particularly beneficial on the Apple Watch's OLED screens, as they reduce power consumption while maximizing visibility.
It’s important to consider color blindness and cultural differences when using color to show interactivity.
Typography
Typography on the Apple Watch needs careful consideration. Typefaces should be legible at small sizes and spaced adequately to prevent visual clutter.
SF Compact is the system font in watchOS, and apps can also use NY. In complications, watchOS uses SF Compact Rounded. It is designed specifically for clarity and readability across all its devices, making it a suitable choice for watchOS.
Iconography and imagery
Iconography and imagery must also be meticulously crafted to ensure they are comprehensible in a compact form.
Icons should be simple and clear, with recognizable shapes that convey their function without the need for text labels. This simplicity helps users quickly understand functionality and navigate apps more efficiently.
When it comes to imagery, it’s important to use high-contrast colors and avoid overly complex graphics that can become indecipherable when scaled down.
Designers should test icons and images under various conditions to ensure consistency and effectiveness across different watch faces and settings.
Apple recommends avoiding using transparency to keep image files small and using autoscaling PDFs to let you provide a single asset for all screen sizes.
Smart Stack and widgets
The Smart Stack is a set of widgets that automatically displays the most relevant widgets based on factors such as time of day, location, or user habits, providing a dynamic and contextual user experience.
For example, at the start of the day, the Weather displays the forecast, and when traveling, the Smart Stack shows boarding passes from Wallet.
For a smooth and predictable reading experience, ensuring visual consistency while designing widgets is important. Apple has created six design layouts that can format your app’s widgets.
- The three-line text layout is ideal for text-heavy content, and it is used by news apps for headlines and brief content snippets.
- The color-coded layout is suitable for grouped or categorized content, like calendar events color-coded by calendar type.
- Bar gauge layout integrates graphical elements with text, which is used in audiobook apps to show progress and chapter information.
- The circular graphic layout combines visual data (like activity rings) with textual insights, enhancing understanding of metrics like calories and exercise minutes.
- The large text layout emphasizes key data or states with a single word or number, which is suitable for displaying prominent information like “high” or “low” or significant numerical values.
- Chart layout is best for representing data over time, providing a dynamic view of trends and changes.
By understanding and implementing these elements, developers, and designers can create apps that are easy to navigate and deeply integrated into the daily flow of user activities.
Accessibility considerations
By integrating accessibility features into your Apple Watch app, you can comply with inclusive design principles and improve the overall user experience. This will make your app more appealing and useful to a diverse audience.
Testing and adapting your designs to meet accessibility standards is not only a requirement but an opportunity to innovate and reach users on the most personal device they own — the Apple Watch.
Here are some tips to design better and more accessible apps for Apple Watch:
- Familiarize yourself with Apple Watch’s accessibility settings, such as Dynamic Type and VoiceOver. Dynamic Type allows users to adjust text sizes for better readability, while VoiceOver assists those who need audio descriptions to navigate the app without looking at the screen. Incorporating these features ensures your app is accessible to a broader audience.
- Test your app regularly with various accessibility settings enabled, such as Bold Text, Reduce Transparency, and Reduce Motion. See how these settings affect your app’s interface and make necessary adjustments.
- Add accessibility labels to your UI elements to improve navigational ease with VoiceOver. These labels should provide clear and concise descriptions of what’s on the screen. This will help users who rely on auditory feedback understand and interact with your app more effectively.
- Always use legible font sizes and support Dynamic Type. This approach helps maintain readability without overcrowding the screen. Utilize Apple’s built-in text styles, which are optimized for the Apple Watch’s display, and ensure text scales correctly with user settings.
Conclusion
To sum up, adopting these design principles and accessibility features not only ensures compliance but also results in creating exceptional user experiences. As the Apple Watch continues to evolve, the apps it supports should also improve, aiming to blend into daily life while providing potent and personalized interactions for each user.
References & where to learn more
- Apple Inc. Supporting multiple watch sizes. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/watchos-apps/supporting-multiple-watch-sizes
- Apple Inc. (2022). Enhance your app with SwiftUI. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10001
- Apple Inc. Designing for watchOS. Apple Developer Documentation. https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/designing-for-watchos
- Apple Inc. Design Resources. https://developer.apple.com/design/resources/#watchos-apps
- Apple Inc. (2023). Design and build apps for watchOS 10. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10138
- Basha, J. (2020). How to design an Apple Watch app. Designmodo. https://designmodo.com/design-apple-watch/
- Rocheleau, J. (2019). Learn 6 fundamental UX smartwatch lessons that Apple learned the hard way. Interaction Design Foundation. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/learn-6-fundamental-ux-smartwatch-lessons-that-apple-learned-the-hard-way?r=yulia-lapicus
