Is it time to redesign... time? Why smartwatches need not show us clock faces
We have seen multiple smartwatch designs hit the market, each ‘smarter’ than the next, competing for your wrist real-estate. But when it comes to the ‘time’, are they being smart at all? Access to time and how we tell it has evolved into three definable paradigms.
New watches, but time-honoured traditions
The three paradigms
Firstly, there was the rotary dial of the analogue wrist watch, allowing you for the first time to have time with you.
Then there was the digital format that removed the conventional dial and round face and brought a character-based system often held in a rectangular face. It seems this is where time has stood still in design terms for the watch; it is as if we have decided that the static digital representation of time is the optimum version.
The third design paradigm, the smartwatch, is where we are today.
Again the smartwatch is defined by technology, but does it deliver the ‘watch’? Does it tell us the ‘time’? More importantly, does it deliver to the user what we think about time now and we tell it to ourselves?
Echoes of the past
Most smartwatch watch face designs you see these days have fallen into the skeuomorphic design approach, the accidental morph into an inherited staple. Whether they are circular or square, they are giving a wrist-worn computer a clock’s face, leaving the user with an uncomfortable mish-mash of old and new.
Some designers have taken initial steps into what we think time should ‘look like’ but these so far are mainly reimagined and abstracted graphic representations in the units of seconds, minutes and hours. They are not going back to the more primary question of what do we need to know and what is time to the modern user?
Time, but not as we know it.
With smartwatches we are now not limited to dials or fixed characters, we have full-colour screen capabilities, so why not step back from dial and digits and move into showing time in context relevant format? What if time wasn’t something you counted down and saw pass – what if we represented time as something you experience in a succession of activities or in relation to your next activity?
This modern use of time and what time means is beginning to be explored and there are a couple of applications that are already experimenting with giving relevant context information to the wearer, such as ‘it will rain for the next 2 hours’, or the more cosmic perspective, depicting the location of the planets in the solar system .
They are also exploring whether we need to know the actual time, or whether we really just need to know what is happening in relation to the next pin-point activity in the hour, day or week. Rather than saying its 4 o’clock, we can be told you have 37 minutes until your next appointment. It's about focusing on the actual doing and not the spaces between what we do, but this is still relatively unexplored.
When we ask ‘what is the time’ we are usually really asking how long till we have to do something; the actual time is irrelevant and this is where this third paradigm of the smartwatch gets really exciting and could revolutionise time as we know, see and interact with it.
It’s the potential benefits of the smartwatch being able to tell us to hurry up or slow down that should fuel new design discoveries.
Time in the information age
Then there is the measurements of time outside of the standard units. What if your personal measurement was ‘tweet now’, ‘you can tweet later’ or even better ‘you are trending now’.
What if the measurement shifted from ‘time’ as we count it and moved into digital activity and data measurements… too much?
No matter what future relationship we have with time, it is still an amazing place for design and UX in relation to the smartwatch and I would love to see companies investing as much ‘smart’ thinking into time as goes into the product design of smartwatches. But I guess it’s just a question of finding the time to do it.
Watch this space…
Peter Fullagar is head of innovation at Kinneir Dufort