BEST DESIGN PRACTICES FOR APPLE WEARABLE APPS

Vamsi Batchu explains the design considerations and best practices to be followed when creating apps for wearables using Apple’s watchOS

- Vamsi Batchu

When Apple first launched its smartwatch to the public, everyone felt that the incredible hardware was lacking features because of software hurdles. Since then, the hardware capabilities of the watch have improved so much that the new Apple Watch is the best smartwatch ever made. Not only does the navigation and UX feel intuitive but all the apps launch super quickly and the overall smartwatch experience has become more mature.

Here are some of the features that set it apart from competitors’ wearables: shortcuts to all your recent and favourite apps; the ability to track your heart rate and see the changes; customising your own Apple Watch faces; achieving activity goals; controlling your MacBook and TV using the watch and many more.

Also with the new launch, Apple released watchOS 6 for the developer community with revolutionary improvements. The best part about the new development kit is that the apps need not have an iPhone component anymore. This makes it easier for the dev community to create standalone watch applications for the first time ever. These are called watch-only apps. In addition to this, applications can now take advantage of new APIs to connect your JavaScript apps to the Apple Watch seamlessly. That is why there is a large need for developers to understand how Apple Watch apps can be designed in a way that is more enjoyable and intuitive.

In this tutorial, you’ll be learning about the best design principles to consider when designing a wearable app for a watch. I will also be looking into designing a sample application on Adobe XD. For the purpose of this tutorial, we are just going to look at a few screens of the app instead of all the screens in the flow. We’re going to create an Apple Watch app for an Uber-Eats-style service in this example.