Aura Health Watch App
The Project
Design and build an Apple Watch experience for Aura Health.
Role: Product Designer and Engineer
Output: Published Watch App, High fidelity screens
Time: March '17
Overview
Aura Health is on a mission to help people prioritize health and happiness through daily meditation. I worked with them to design and engineer a simple yet elegant Apple Watch experience that gives people access to meditation, on their wrist.
Our main objective for the Watch App was to increase accessibility and ease of access to core features of the Aura Health app. I was given one month to create and submit a watch app to the app store.
Background
Team
I worked with the founders of Aura Health, Steve and Daniel. I was the chief product designer and engineer for the Apple Watch application. I created the updated visual design for the watch app as well as prioritizing the feature set and optimizing the flow.
Constraints
I had a limited time constraint when working on the app. We needed the app to be submitted and approved by Apple within a month so that it could potentially be highlighted on the front page of the watch app store. *spoiler alert* We were featured on the front page!
Another technical constraint was getting the native Watch app to communicate with the React Native Framework. This was also my first time working with Apple watch, so I needed to spend time familiarizing myself with Apple Watch’s design patterns, usability guidelines, and watch API.
Figure A - Initial screen designs V1
Initial Design & prototyping
When I came on to start work on the watch app, I was handed the initial screens as shown above (Figure A) as well as a feature list. The screens were essentially taken from the phone app and adapted to fit a watch size screen. These screens had similar functionality to the full mobile application. Given the time constraint as well as my cursory experience developing for Apple Watch, I dove immediately into prototyping the watch app on Xcode. Although this is generally not the most ideal way to solve a design problem, I wanted to give myself as much time as possible with the development cycle.
Prototyping in Xcode allowed me to learn how to build the watch apps while at the same time delve into the design problems we were trying to solve. I began by making prototypes in Xcode storyboard and soon had the non-functional versions of the screens in Figure 1. We soon realized after some internal usability testing that the screens were unwieldy and overall unnecessary for a lightweight wearable experience.
Iteration
Reducing Complexity
Within the Apple Watch HIG, design for the Apple Watch is centered around "Lightweight Interactions". Following this mantra, we decided to keep only the most essential screens. One of the notable choices was the emission of the "Upgrade Now" screen. Although this functionality is core to the app's monetary profit, including the screen was incongruous with the essence of a wearable application.
I settled on about half the amount of screens we had initially planned for, while still maintaining the core functionality of the application.
Apple Watch Design Patterns
Utilizing native UI elements was key in conforming to Apple Watch design patterns. Since the watch app has such a small screen, using Apple's native UI was essential as it allowed for efficient use of the screen real estate.
One of the visual design choices was the removal of background images on the watch. Although the Android and iOS app both utilized background images, conforming to Apple's patterns was more important than consistency across platforms.
Figure B - Finalized Wireframes
Key Changes
After playing with the prototype screens, it became clear to me that these features were burdensome to navigate through on a watch screen for the average user. Meditation type, rating system, and save meditation were the first features I removed from the design. I also lobbied to remove meditation restrictions and variable meditation lengths. I chose mood tracking and quick meditation as the core functionality pieces of the watch app.
Final Design and Results
I finished design and development for the app within the allotted one month time period. The app became a perfect companion piece to start quick meditations on Apple Watch for our users. After we submitted the watch app to the App Store, it was featured by Apple on the front page in the watch app section!
Figure C - Final Screens
Retrospective
If I were to do it again, I would have spent more time in the prototyping stage, building out semi-functional prototypes, and having our team test them internally. Because, we didn’t spend enough time in this stage at the beginning of the process, I ended up having to spend much more time in development, and I had to entirely rebuild the app at one point. Instead of jumping directly into prototyping, bringing up feature definition as an early conversation would have been helpful.
As it turns out, I think it was a good idea to build prototypes in Xcode. This allowed us us have real device experience (some of the watch api communicating with the app introduced some constraints). It also let me familiarize myself with watch development as well as get more accurate development time estimates.