Wear OS, previously called Android Wear, is a smart watch operating system from Google. As staff interaction designer on the Wear OS UX team, I designed the setup and onboarding experiences for the watches, along with leading the mobile phone companion app experiences for Android and iOS users from versions 1.3 through 2.0. For context, Android Wear smartwatches at the time required a mobile app to help facilitate the setup experience and manage the handover of settings, preferences, and more to the watch.
Watch setup and onboarding
I designed and oversaw multiple iterations of the setup flow, which included choreographing states between the watch and phone in a manner that I describe in my article “The choreography of companion setup.”
I established principles and techniques for post-setup, on-watch onboarding and user education, and designed educational features such as a wrist gesture playthrough tutorial. I also designed an interactive (and optional) welcome tutorial for new users of the watch that utilized new visual interface cues such as swipe and hardware button indicators.
Companion apps
I designed versions 1.3 – 2.0 of the Android mobile companion apps for Wear watches, as well as the first version of the iOS companion app to enable iOS support for Android Wear form factors. Of the features I updated in the Android-side companion app was the addition of the ability to connect to multiple watches, so that someone with different watch styles could swap them for different outfits or use cases without having to disconnect one and connect another each time.
Each of these projects involved collaborating with visual and motion designers, engineers, product managers, devrel, legal, privacy, and the larger Android platform team.
Summary of my activities
- Strategy & visioning
- Project management
- Concept design
- Interaction design
- UI / visual design
- Prototyping
- Guideline publication