What if the Apple Watch was less annoying
How my phoneless week revealed many missed opportunities.
When Apple first announced cellular connectivity on its watches, my visions for the future excited me. The death of the smartphone was in sight! But when I activated cellular on my watch a couple of weeks ago, I quickly realized my predictions were further away than I thought. Last week, I decided to spend the entire week phoneless. I wanted to test if the watch’s little 44-millimeter display could fill the shoes of my phone’s 5.8-inch screen. In an age where digital minimalism and in-distractible environments are becoming increasingly necessary, I could cut back on my phone dependency by replacing it with the watch. My pains of phoneless life, however, far outweighed my pains of distracted life. It quickly became clear to me that Apple did not intend for people to completely leave their iPhone in the dust for their watch. On top of the battery barely making it through a single day on a charge, the watch lacked apps I didn’t know I’d miss so much. Throughout my phoneless week, I made a mental wishlist of apps I wished were available on my Apple Watch. Here are some concept designs for apps I’d like to have on my watch.
Tinder
Swiping on Tinder is probably my favorite time-waster. There were a couple of times throughout the week when I wanted to do something mindless like “find love” (lol). For this redesign, I stripped the Tinder app to its iconic, gamified function: swiping. I made sure key information like name and age were displayed on the main screen and a single tap on the picture takes you to information like school, job, distance, and bio. I excluded messaging from the Apple Watch edition because I find messaging on the Apple Watch to be very frustrating — the scribble function is slow and aggravating while the dictation function is inconvenient and uncomfortable (imagine speaking a flirty message into your Apple Watch while on the bus).
Next bus/train
Since public transit is my primary means of transportation, I’ve become more reliant on third-party apps like Transit or MARTA On The Go to keep me in motion. Neither of these apps offers a version for Apple Watch and the Apple Maps app is decent for getting directions but clunky for checking bus times or the current status of my daily commute. My transit app redesign shows realtime or scheduled information for the bus and rail lines near you or near where you are going to be.
Passwords app
I was surprised to realize how reliant I was on my iPhone to look up passwords in my iCloud Keychain. There were a couple of times I was locked out of some accounts on my work computer because I didn’t remember my password. I designed a simple concept for iCloud Keychain on Apple Watch so I could keep all my passwords on my wrist for easy access on any computer! It might be hard to find a password if your list of accounts is long, so my next step for this would be to develop an easy way to search through your accounts.
A better Photos app
The current native Photos app for watch only displays photos in your Favorites album from your iPhone. Aside from choosing a photo from your Favorites to become a watch face, there is no other functionality offered in the existing app. My design restructures your photos so you can view them all. I loved the idea of using the force touch as navigation (as illustrated in the first mockup). This way you can easily find photos based on time, album, places, or faces. In the third mockup, the force touch function allows users to share photos straight from the photo app via Messages, Mail, or Airdrop; I kept the “Create Watch Face” feature as well.
YouTube audio
Currently, YouTube does not have an Apple Watch app, so after work, I couldn’t indulge in my guilty pleasure of watching The View. Most of the channels that I’m subscribed to on YouTube are these news/pop culture/talk show types that are more about what’s being said than what’s being shown. Without a large display and a comfortable way to look at my watch screen for a couple minutes straight, I propose a YouTube for Apple Watch app that only includes audio. This way I could listen to my favorite co-hosts spill the tea during “Hot Topics” on The View, phoneless! Through exploring the UI of this app, I decided to use the Apple Watch force touch as a way to switch between what would be tabs in the iPhone app (as illustrated in the first watch animation above).
Recently, I’ve been bored with the lack of innovation with new smartphones. I’m not sure what its distant future looks like, but I hope more companies invest in wearable technology. With a little more TLC from Apple and App Store developers, I could easily replace my iPhone with my Apple Watch. I’m also curious to see how the alleged VR/AR products Apple has in the works will change the phone landscape and how much better or worse our screentime will get. I could probably get away with going phoneless a couple of days a week, but the phoneless future I envision isn’t coming anytime soon.
