Assignment 3 - Trends In Interfaces

Recently, the number of “wearable apps” for use in smartwatches have increased.  These types of app have evolved from bringing just notifications to your wrists into something much more — they can entertain you, track your fitness and health, and help you to stay organized. Although most of these apps still rely on a partner app on your smartphone, some offer stand-alone functionality. Regardless of how it functions, information is still being displayed into small screen space of either square, rectangular-shaped, or round sized smartwatches. This is a classic design issue of wearable screens. For a standalone smartwatch app, one of the most important principle is to design ‘lightweight’ interactions – that is, minimize interactions and keep interfaces simple by only showing what’s essential for a user to complete a certain task.

For this assignment, your task is to design a new wearable app that is specifically used as a standalone app for a smartwatch. Your app can be any type of app that you wish (see list below for example). Each team member will need to come up with screen designs for a different function of your app. Describe the flow of user interaction for each of the function and how your design achieves the ‘lightweight’ interaction principle discussed above.