After evaluating the gadgets in the previous post and seeing how the various control schemes would work in the context of our initial prototypes, we began to see which control schemes would be feasible and which wouldn't.
The gadgets we looked at had the following control schemes (or mixtures thereof); buttons, joysticks, jog dials and touch screens.
The Ipod Touch is predominantly a touch screen device (it's main unique selling point) and is really prime example of a mass produced finger operated device, so any watch design could take a lot of inspiration from this. Indeed one of our intial sketches has touch scroll bars, and we had initially not ruled out the possibility of a complete touch screen watch.
In operation the device was nice and reasonably intuitive to use (in my opinion as an unfamiliar test subject), yet we did have a few response issues selecting smaller menus such as songs. Using a familiar panagram 'the quick fox jumps over the lazy dog' to test a touch screen keyboard against a mini keyboard of the pocket pc phone we found that typing on the ipod to be more fiddly and error prone then that of the hardware mini keyboard found on the pocket pc phone (even after some training). This leads us to believe that a complete touch screen device or any complex data entry would be impractical at best for a watch with a such a small display.
The other interesting thing to note was that even Apple felt the need to place some buttons on the device; a main 'home' button and a 'hold' button, yet we could see how critical these buttons were for certain key features. Overall we felt that touch interfaces should be limited to tap and scrolling alone.
One of our initial prototype sketches employs a jog dial design, the Sony Clie PDA, it is in my opinion one of the best jog dials I have come across, yet we could instantly see one of the flaws in our jog dial initial prototype; you can't operate buttons on the front and a jog dial on the side without a seriously uncomfortable hand position, so if this design is to be carried forward we need to place buttons on the side. We also realised the potential for accidental movement of a jog dial placed into a watch scenario, so this is something to be taken into account.
The MP4 Watch has a user interface driven entirely by buttons on either side of the device. The video shows how this appears to be reasonable effective for small tasks such as navigation and moving around simple screens but makes browsing a large list of files quite laborious. Our watch (depending on our final user interface) could have a user searching through dozens to hundreds of friends, so this is something to keep in mind.
Another limitation we could see from the youtube video was the apparant difficulty the user had in pressing some of the buttons, this could be laborious for lots of information, but the loud mechanical 'click' of the buttons at least provides good feedback. Perhaps this was a trade off made by the designers to avoid accidental operation. In any buttons are still essential for many devices, so we will continue with button designs whilst keeping limitations in mind.
Other initial sketches employed a track ball and track pad design, which we could see on further reflection are probably not suited to a space constrained watch. Most track pads and track balls are designed for pointing devices which is entirely unsuitable for a small device, and we could imagine would be highly prone to accidental activation.
Our joystick enabled initial sketch is inspired by the Sony Ericsson series of phones; this does serve in our opinion for good interface navigation on small devices, as the phones prove in practice, but we noted that the end user would have to use a 'thumb only' type of grasp to actually operate it, we will have to judge how comfortable this is based on user feedback.
The gadgets we looked at had the following control schemes (or mixtures thereof); buttons, joysticks, jog dials and touch screens.
The Ipod Touch is predominantly a touch screen device (it's main unique selling point) and is really prime example of a mass produced finger operated device, so any watch design could take a lot of inspiration from this. Indeed one of our intial sketches has touch scroll bars, and we had initially not ruled out the possibility of a complete touch screen watch.
In operation the device was nice and reasonably intuitive to use (in my opinion as an unfamiliar test subject), yet we did have a few response issues selecting smaller menus such as songs. Using a familiar panagram 'the quick fox jumps over the lazy dog' to test a touch screen keyboard against a mini keyboard of the pocket pc phone we found that typing on the ipod to be more fiddly and error prone then that of the hardware mini keyboard found on the pocket pc phone (even after some training). This leads us to believe that a complete touch screen device or any complex data entry would be impractical at best for a watch with a such a small display.
The other interesting thing to note was that even Apple felt the need to place some buttons on the device; a main 'home' button and a 'hold' button, yet we could see how critical these buttons were for certain key features. Overall we felt that touch interfaces should be limited to tap and scrolling alone.
One of our initial prototype sketches employs a jog dial design, the Sony Clie PDA, it is in my opinion one of the best jog dials I have come across, yet we could instantly see one of the flaws in our jog dial initial prototype; you can't operate buttons on the front and a jog dial on the side without a seriously uncomfortable hand position, so if this design is to be carried forward we need to place buttons on the side. We also realised the potential for accidental movement of a jog dial placed into a watch scenario, so this is something to be taken into account.
The MP4 Watch has a user interface driven entirely by buttons on either side of the device. The video shows how this appears to be reasonable effective for small tasks such as navigation and moving around simple screens but makes browsing a large list of files quite laborious. Our watch (depending on our final user interface) could have a user searching through dozens to hundreds of friends, so this is something to keep in mind.
Another limitation we could see from the youtube video was the apparant difficulty the user had in pressing some of the buttons, this could be laborious for lots of information, but the loud mechanical 'click' of the buttons at least provides good feedback. Perhaps this was a trade off made by the designers to avoid accidental operation. In any buttons are still essential for many devices, so we will continue with button designs whilst keeping limitations in mind.
Other initial sketches employed a track ball and track pad design, which we could see on further reflection are probably not suited to a space constrained watch. Most track pads and track balls are designed for pointing devices which is entirely unsuitable for a small device, and we could imagine would be highly prone to accidental activation.
Our joystick enabled initial sketch is inspired by the Sony Ericsson series of phones; this does serve in our opinion for good interface navigation on small devices, as the phones prove in practice, but we noted that the end user would have to use a 'thumb only' type of grasp to actually operate it, we will have to judge how comfortable this is based on user feedback.
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