Design Issues & Further Inspiration

Now that we are pretty certain of our final hardware design, we have moved on to designing our final watch software user interface. As part of this process we have noticed some intriguing design issues; in earlier posts we discussed features the watch would have as well as the various alerts it would give to user, implementing these features in an intuitive way however we have not thus far discussed.

Function of buttons: It's clear that this is a pretty important part of our design, we had the dilemma of whether to design our GUI to use hard coded buttons or so called 'soft' buttons. Most mobile phone devices have soft buttons, where the function of buttons change according to context and a label describing its function is displayed at the bottom of the screen just above the respective button. After some debate we realised that perhaps this wouldn't be appropriate for such a small screen, and that our focus should be on reserving screen space for the key information we wanted to display. Thus we would have to use hard buttons, and we turned to my ipod shuffle to see if this would be a good solution...

It became clear that we could make a small modification to our joystick prototype; the addition of two side buttons for functions that are used rarely. Whilst still preserving the simplicity of the device, and that we could create the interface without being overly limited. Another lesson we learnt from the ipod shuffle is that every button is clearly marked and serves one purpose only, there is no confusing duplication. Obviously the parallels between our device and the ipod shuffle end here, as we have a screen to deal with, but nonetheless a screen should not be an excuse to make a device more complicated.

Handling Notifications: A previous post described how the watch would alert the user on various external events like a friend entering the vicinity or an imminent party or event, although this would probably be done either audibly or by some kind of haptic feedback, it hadn't previously occurred to us how we would alert the user when they are actually browsing the device for information.

In this particular scenario it would be a usability disaster if the watch was to navigate the user away from the screen they were currently viewing in order to alert them of an event, this lead be to look at the xbox360 model of notifications for inspiration...

In my opinion this is a classic piece of HCI, it appears unobtrusively tells the correct player key information and doesn't in any way interfere with the task at hand. Unfortunately the key to this working is having a large amount of screen space available, something the watch is severely limited with, but it is something we can keep in mind for our design.