Among watchmakers, a complication refers to any mechanism on a watch that does something other than tell time. They're essentially analog apps that live on the watch face: chronographs, date displays, moon phases, and the like.
Things work a little differently in Google's smartwatch universe. In an effort to ensure its Android Wear watch faces remain clean and simple, complications have been kept behind swipes, notifications, and "OK Google" commands. The watch face has, until now, been reliably static.
Google changed course today, announcing that it will let developers build interactivity into watch faces. Tap on an Android Wear watch face and all sorts of things can happen. You can see an expanded weather forecast, dive deeper into your activity monitoring data, or open your latest email without ever leaving the first screen. It's a little like the way Apple handles complications, but could soon turn into something much more. And in a lot of ways, this added functionality is just the most recent attempt to figure out how we can and should be using this new form of gadgetry. Smartwatches haven't really caught on; making them even simpler to use might help.
It’s easy to see where this might go. Pong on your watch face? A brilliant distraction. Want to change the color-way of your watch face? Just give the screen a touch. And as cool as that stuff might be, it's just the beginning of how smartwatches might change as we bring interactivity to the front of the watch experience.
The smartwatch face is a crazy-undervalued feature. It's the first screen you see. It’s there to tell the time, sure, but it’s also a huge opportunity to define how you should interact with your device. A more functional face can provide faster access to the things you do most often and help alleviate some of the inherent slowness of a smartwatch, circumventing slow loading times and awkward first-generation interfaces. So what happens when all of a sudden your watch face starts to feel less like a cosmetic cover and more like an app?
That’s what we’re about to find out.
Brett Lider likes to bike to work. Since he's the head of Android Wear’s design team, you might figure he uses his watch as an activity monitor. On a daily basis Lider opens an activity monitoring app like Strava and activates its always-on mode, which allows an individual app to stay on the watch's display. It's a clever hack, putting Strava at the forefront of his smartwatch experience. The thing is, Lider still had to navigate to his app, launch it, and wait for it to load before he can get going. He wanted to do it right from the watch's face instead. “With a single tap I could have launched the app to record my bike ride,” he says. “Any other way than being directly on the watch face is going to take significantly more time, and there's no way around that.”
Right now you might be saying, So what? It’s not like it’s hard to swipe right to open an app. But the way Lider sees it, if a key selling point for the smartwatch is glanceability and ease of use, it stands to reason the watch should be as simple to use as possible. “Speed of access is important in general and especially important for devices in a new category,” he says. “Anything we can do to reduce friction and increase usability is changing the calculation for the space.”
The watch face is just one more opportunity for Google to surface the information you need as fast as possible. Google accounts for this in part with notifications and voice activation, but Toph Brown, a producer at Ustwo’s New York office who worked on developing the guidelines for the new API, says the key difference is having choice in the matter. “Notifications push at you,” he says. “They’re not something you ask for, necessarily.” The watch face is there, like an attentive waiter, giving you the opportunity to ask for something more if you happen to want it.
To demonstrate the power of the interactive watch face, Ustwo created a face called Bits. It looks like the cylinder of a six-shooter, each circle representing a different data set. You can add as many as seven complications (weather, calendar, email, etc); tap one and it expands to show a little more info. So for example, if you tap on the weather icon, you’ll see what the weather is like now and later in the day. Tapping on the calendar circle will surface information about who you're meeting with, but won't take you to the agenda app.
The interaction falls just short of what you’d expect from an actual application. That’s the point. Though I was itching for Bits to launch me into a full-on application experience, Brown says they purposefully erred on the side of restraint. The user, he says, has a specific kind of relationship with a watch face that requires it to be more light-handed than a full-blown app. “The question is," he says, "what kinds of things do you want to allow the user to do when they tap on a watch face? Should there be a subset of taps and behaviors developers can use so there’s still a line between watch faces and apps?"
Lider, too, views the tapping capability as a way to build "shallow" watch face experiences. He’s encouraging developers to use the face as a launch point for deeper app experiences, instead of building that directly into the watch face. In that way, Google's initial intentions are similar to what Apple already is doing by placing complications in the four corners of the Apple Watch's screen. From those four corners you can launch into a number of pre-set apps like an alarm clock or weather with a single tap. That's just the beginning.
Developers are free to push the boundaries of interactivity, and you can expect that deeper on-face experiences will begin to pop up and blur the line between app and watch face even more. What we'll probably end up seeing are a lot of experiences like Bits, which live in smartwatch no-man’s land—not quite static faces, not quite apps. These half-apps, if designed well, are a clever answer to figuring out a smart watch’s real value. Extrapolate that even further to smart watch faces that surface complications based on context, and things get even more exciting. It’s a small step forward in bridging the distance between the two ideals of glanceability and effective deep interaction.
Brown says this first update is an invitation for experimentation. It’s hard to say how much interaction a user expects until you see how people use the feature. “We’re still asking what is uniquely valuable about wearables,” says Brown. “And we think that adding tap to a watch is a step in the right direction of understanding a little bit more about how these things are useful to people.”
