At long last, on April 24, the Apple Watch debuted to largely positive reviews. Known for releasing category-killing tech products and creating the buzz needed to get them off the ground, Apple likely has another winner in the wearables category.
But no matter how sleek the product and how futuristic its promise, questions remain as to how the Apple Watch—and by extension, every smartwatch to come—will be used. And nowhere is that raison d’être more mysterious than in the world of marketing.
“What’s odd is that in many ways, the watch functions a lot like a small iPhone,” wrote Joshua Topolsky in a Bloomberg review. “So you end up in a lot of situations where you not only have to take action, you have to decide where to take action.”
Smaller screen, bigger questions
While the Apple Watch tells time and offers plenty of other fantastic functions, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for interaction. The smaller of the two case sizes available measures just 33.3 mm wide by 38.6 mm tall, and the larger is 35.9 mm by 42 mm.
Apple’s Retina displays go a long way toward rendering images on a smaller scale, but measure only 312 x 390 pixels on the larger of the two models, or 1.35 square inches—not much space to point and click, much less type a message.
To ease input, the Apple Watch includes a Force Touch interface that responds not only to the location of the click, but also the pressure exerted, to differentiate user intent. And the watch’s “crown” is actually a scroll control that helps navigate menus.
Considering the lack of a keyboard, one would expect voice recognition to take on a new importance on the Apple Watch—and some reviewers report that Siri has improved. “Voice recognition was excellent, surprisingly quick and more useful than you’d expect,” according to CNET.
But unusual words and brand names can confound her. “When Siri did work, it was for the small stuff Siri is generally good at, like converting units in the kitchen or setting a timer,” said The Verge’s Nilay Patel. “Anything more complicated generally resulted in Siri prompting me to use my iPhone.”
Excelling with apps that inform
Still, the learning curve on the new input methods is considerable. Among the 3,500 apps and counting now available for the Apple Watch, the most successful are those that emphasize the informative rather than the interactive.
Apple’s own Activity app is getting raves, for instance, but the heartbeat notification is gimmicky. And making a Sketch on the watch “seems like a great idea until you realize how little space you have to work with,” the Bloomberg review said.
Weather and traffic information, flight updates from airline apps, and sports scores form ESPN and the NBA seem to have the most efficacious appeal. Other companies require users to press a few buttons, however.
Popular apps from Uber, Shazam, and Fandango keep clickable buttons to a minimum, while location-based apps such as Yelp and Around Me make the buttons big to help locate nearby restaurants, ATMs and drycleaners.
Making interaction easy
Likewise, most retailers are keeping their apps simple to suit the Apple Watch’s postage-stamp display. Zulily’s app, for example, is intended to help shoppers bookmark items listed on the flash-sale site for later viewing and purchasing on a separate screen.
The eBay app allows users to adjust bids in auctions they are already participating in, but doesn’t permit browsing. And Target’s app curates shopping lists written on its iPhone app or a desktop, pinging shoppers as they approach the items in-store with the aid of beacons.
J.C. Penney’s “shopping companion” is one of the most extensive retail apps available for the Apple Watch so far. It offers shopping and wish lists, locates out-of-stock items at nearby stores, and volunteers gift ideas based on the occasion and pricepoint.
Among large e-commerce concerns, only Amazon has released an app with prominent click-to-buy capabilities for the Apple Watch, helping users buy frequently-purchased items with a single tap. But browsing is tedious.
Notifications seem to be the Apple Watch’s early stock-in-trade, with its Taptic Engine providing a range of distinct taps, sounds and vibrations as alerts. Along with Target, Indianapolis-based Marsh Supermarkets is among the first to take advantage of the Apple Watch and Bluetooth beacons to push notifications to shoppers.
In search of a use case
In duplicating the functions of an iPhone or requiring another screen to complete most actions, the Apple Watch often does more to distract and confuse, according to (again, mostly positive) first-person reviews. “The Apple Watch is cool, it’s beautiful, it’s powerful, and it’s easy to use,” according to Bloomberg. “But it’s not essential. Not yet.”
And a use case that requires only the Apple Watch in retail marketing has yet to be discovered. “I wonder what you would actually buy on a small screen, when your phone is right there,” Daz McColl, global chief of brand strategy for SapientNitro, told Digiday.
Can a wearable with only slightly more than one square inch of display space replace the smartphone? “Your phone does a lot that your computer used to do,” McColl said. “We’ve adapted to that small screen. Will that continue down the line to an even smaller screen? We’ll find out.”