Pre-Class Task

Before our first class we were sent an email from Kyle that gave us some work to do shown here

• Objective
• To analyse key competitor smartwatch apps to identify features, user experience elements, and market strategies, aiming to inform improvements and differentiation for our app.
• Competitor Identification:
  • Select 3 top competing smartwatch apps across fitness, health, productivity, and lifestyle categories.
• Feature Comparison:
  • Compare key features (e.g., heart rate monitoring, GPS, notifications).
  • Identify unique features and frequency of updates.
  • User Experience (UX) & Design:
  • Assess design, navigation, and onboarding.
  • Note common patterns and unique UX approaches.

So here is my analysis:

Firstly I went on Pinterest to just browse some smartwatch apps, as it’s something I’m not very well versed in.

My first thoughts through looking the sea of smartwatch apps was: why is everything in dark mode? I feel as if I made my app a brighter colour it would stick out so that is my initial thought, they all use a feature of a smart watch which of course it will so I guess I’m just wondering what I should do with mine.

I then looked at the apps I have on my old Apple Watch SE, and choose 3 worth talking about these were

• Workout - Apple - Health
• Spotify - Spotify - Lifestyle
• Outlook - Microsoft - Productivity

So below I’m going to go through each one and cover each point

Workout

The Apple watch has a workout app which monitors your different workouts

The key features of the workout app are heart rate monitoring, recording workouts, stopwatch, time tracking, calorie counting and a music player. Some unique features of the app is the sync to iPhone, so it records your workouts and rings and sends it to your fitness app on your iPhone so you can see the statistics of your workouts, it updates every 15 minutes for your step count and does real time tracking of your workout, as for general patches the workout app is part of the core apple watch system so it updates when the watch updates, so about every month or so.

The Ui follows the typical apple watch design of dark mode, right greens, blues and yellows, it was designed this way to allow for more accessibility for users, as the watch is a small screen, it tries to make up for the design for having a large text size and large icons that can be easily pressed by your pointer finger, it also has the time on the top right as it’s also meant to be a watch so it needs to tell the time. The UX is the accessibility and mini features of the app, so I’ve talked about the size of icons and fonts that are easier to see and press but there are also functions for the user, so the workout app has multiple workouts, one that comes to mind is swimming, and of course water can get into your device and destroy it, but with the swimming workout it activates the watches water lock feature which prevents water getting into the system. another UX feature is the statistics that sync to the fitness app, allowing the user to see the stats of their workout, so a walk for example, it’ll show the brief statistics of the walk on the watch and it’ll send it to the users phone