“Design is a dialogue between designers and users” - Emmet Connolly
At Estimote, we’re firm believers in wearables. It’s why we released our WatchKit SDK (for building location-aware apps for the Apple Watch) weeks before the watch itself was available. We believe wearables are the next frontier for contextual computing. Location awareness is steadily gaining traction on mobile, but it’s this next step that will turn context from a ‘nice to have’ to an indispensable part of the user interface.
The evolution of mobile devices–from large screens we take out of our pockets to much smaller screens strapped to our wrists–will change how we experience the world around us. Beacons add another dimension to this evolution, similar to the incredible wave that smart technologies like Android Wear are creating. To better understand the potential of wearables, we sat down with Emmet Connolly, a co-founder of Google’s Android Wear initiative and currently Director of Product Design at Intercom. We discussed all things contextual computing and the future of wearables, nearables and the potential synergy between them. Enjoy the read!
Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote: Android Wear has been out for quite some time already, and Apple Watch is about to hit the shelves. How do you expect the next year or two to look for wearables?
Emmet Connolly, Director of Product Design at Intercom: I think they’re going to be really interesting! We’ve had all these open questions for a while now, and I expect a lot of the answers start to become clearer.
How mainstream are these devices going to become? How will they materially improve the lives of ordinary people? How will designers overcome some of the inherent challenges like limited input and social acceptability? Design is really a dialogue between designers and users, and now with significant adoption starting to happen we’re finally going to be able to get some answers.
WB:Smart watches seem all the rage now. Are there any other wearable form factors you think might take off in the future?
EC: There’s a reason it’s not called “Android Watch”! There are many different ways of slicing the problem. So yes, I absolutely expect different form factors to happen. I thought that the Runcible was pretty interesting, for example. Odd and totally niche, but fun and different and suggestive of a bunch of other things.
In some ways I feel like we’re in the “horseless carriage” phase of wearables, with a lot of really literal references to traditional watches. I’m not even all that attached to the “wearables” label at all. It seems unnecessarily limiting. There are so many different ways of making a computer that make sense.
For example, we don’t just have one type of motor vehicle, right? We have cars, motorbikes, trucks, vans, bulldozers, tractors, buses, and so on. The combustion engine led to lots of different vehicles that are suitable for different needs. And I think it’s going to be the same for computers. We won’t just have the computers, we’ll have desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, TVs, watches, bracelets, rings, clothes, pocketables, magnets, pendants and who knows what else. But each will be best suited to a particular task or context.
WB:Where do you expect wearables to make the biggest impact? Payments, communication, fitness apps… or maybe something completely different?
EC: My short answer is diagnostic health: there’s a huge opportunity there to make these devices indispensable to how we live. To make them so important and valuable that you can’t not have one. I think we’ll look back on how we diagnose our health problems today and be quite horrified at how ridiculously antiquated it all was. It just seems so random and scattershot and reactive.
But there are huge challenges at a technical level to get all of the sensors working reliably and especially at a regulatory level because the cost of giving bad health advice can be fatal. That’s why so many of the fitness type devices seem to be languishing at the step-counting level for a while now, because it’s a really difficult thing for a company to take on moving to the next level and providing medical advice. From what I can tell even Apple has run into this. Maybe a new type of company will be needed, some strange hybrid of tech, pharma, insurance, and lifestyle? My guess is that this is still several years out. Who knows. But it’s too important to ignore.
Anyway, the main reason that I say health is that the benefits are inherent to the form factor: in other words, this is not really something your phone can do a great job at, it needs to be something that’s attached to you all the time.
A close second for me is fine-grained location-based services, like the types that will be enabled by Estimote Beacons. GPS enabled a whole new set of products from Google Maps to Uber to Strava to Foursquare. And GPS is pretty coarse! Knowing how close a user is to a specific point in space will open up a whole new set of possibilities. And wearables seem like the ideal way to situate a person in relation to these places, and interact with them. So there’s this convergence of emerging trends – wearables, precise location mapping, Internet of Things, context engines – that feels like it will eventually all combine something brand new. It just unlocks a whole new set of off-screen experiences. This seems much more immediately achievable than the health stuff, because all of the necessary tech basically exists already, we just need developers to invent the experiences and I think a Cambrian explosion of new ideas is now right around the corner. What the app ecosystem was to smartphones, nearables and connected devices will be to wearables.
All the other stuff – better notifications, voice search, payments – may certainly be great enhancements. They may even be better that doing the same thing on the phone, and that’s worth a lot. But they probably won’t be the fundamentally new experiences that wearables enable.
WB:What’s your idea of a killer wearable app? Or maybe it’s already out there?
EC: A watch that constantly displays my exact calorie surplus or deficit for today. Calories consumed versus calories burned.
We have all these insanely enormous diet and exercise industries, and they all basically boil down to: don’t consume more energy than you expend. Every one of them, that’s it, they’re all variations on that theme. Directly addressing that equation could cut out a lot of nonsense.
It’s definitely not out there already. Some apps estimate your calorie burn as a factor of estimated movement, but it’s imprecise. And there’s no automatic solution to calories consumed, which is what you have all these painful meal entry apps.
A ton of services could be built on top of this, but that’s basically it.
WB:Moving on to contextual computing: how important is user context in wearable interfaces?
EC: The question of how to interact with these devices came up early. The screen is tiny, so it’s going to be kind of a pain to swipe around and launch apps, right? This became a key question for us on Android Wear.
So then we asked ourselves, what are we launching these apps for anyway? I mean, it’s a pain to find and download and maintain all of these apps anyway, so what are they really for? They’re mostly for accessing content or performing an action of some sort. Now look at these devices, they’ve got small or maybe even no touchscreens, but they’ve got loads of other sensors that can detect the situation the wearer is in. So rather than resisting the natural strengths and weaknesses of wearables by tacking on this legacy UI model from phones, we tried to think about the interaction that was native to the new devices. And that was to use these sensors to detect context, and then automatically offer up the right information at just the right time.
So this solved a local UI problem for wearables, but more broadly, I think that context is becoming the most important trend in modern computing. The bother of managing apps, having to look up information, basically performing digital chores, none of that is really specific to wearables. The automatic grunge work is the stuff computers are supposed to be good at! We shouldn’t have to be doing all that stuff!
So you see this trend of doing things contextually appear in other places too, and it’s fueling new interactions. What you folks are doing at Estimote is a clear example of this, where things can happen automatically based on what I’m near rather than me having to jump through hoops. It also means that messages can be targeted to people at exactly the right time, such as when they walk into a certain area.
That’s also a big part of what I’m now working on with Intercom. Our mission is to make internet business personal. A big part of this is making communicating with customers contextual – enabling businesses to send the right message to the right customer at the right time. The problem of notification spam is probably going to get worse before it gets better, and exacerbated by wearables, so for me it’s a hugely important problem to be working on. We’re taking a totally new approach to messaging – contextual targeting based on in-product behavior, as well as other factors. You could apply this approach to almost any existing product. There’s a ton of new things that we can do based on context that wouldn’t have made sense under old models.
WB:iBeacon and nearables give mobile devices location context. What should developers watch out for when integrating them into wearable apps?
EC: Again, I wouldn’t make a huge distinction between wearables and non-wearables here. Any computer you’ve got with you should be treated the same. If we are indeed moving into a period where I might be carrying more than one connected device at a time, it’s likely we’ll see a move away from a targeted, device-specific approach to notifications and start thinking of this as a constellation of interconnected devices.
For me the challenge for nearables (which I love as a term, BTW) is the same as for any devices pushing information to a user: keeping it timely and relevant. There’s a big risk of coming off spammy and annoying, which would obviously be a horrible user experience and something to look out for.
WB:Do you see location and proximity-awareness unlock any new uses for mobile and wearable devices, that haven’t been explored before?
I do, but just like it would have been difficult to look at GPS and predict that Uber would become an inevitability, it’s hard to say what exactly they might be. Lots of people have been throwing around the old “get a coupon when you walk by a store” idea for many years now, but once the obvious stuff has been worked through the interesting edges will start to emerge. All of these things will be iterative and need to develop organically, although I’m sure it will also happen quickly.
WB:Is there an existing use case for iBeacon, geofencing, or another location-based service that made you say “oh snap, that’s cool?”
EC: The user experiences that Disney are creating with their Magicband system sound amazing. It’s interesting, because so many of these systems have a chicken-and-egg problem: it’s not worth creating a network of beacons without widespread adoption of wearables, and one of the main reasons to adopt wearables might be to interact with beacons. But Disneyland doesn’t have that problem: it’s this hermetically-sealed, tightly-controlled environment thaat is totally mediated, so in that sense it’s actually really interesting as a large-scale experiment. And by the sound of things they’re doing something really compelling.
That’s kind of how I see the wearables ecosystem bootstrapping itself, by the way: build up critical mass with notifications and basic movement tracking, which leads to widespread use of beacons. That in turn leads to broader wearable adoption, which eventually leads us to the point where serious health features become widespread. At which point we have all achieved wearable computing nirvana and it’s time to move on to “swallowables!”
Emmet Connolly: Director of Product Design at Intercom. Previously Android Wear instigator, Google[x], Google Search.