With the advent of Android Wear in 2014 and Apple Watch in 2015, PGi’s goal was to be the first to add one-touch join functionality to smart watch offerings through an iMeet Agenday integration.
Objective
Enhance the iMeet Agenday experience through a watch app integration, allowing users to access their calendar and join conference calls right from their wrists.
Challenges
The iMeet Agenday watch apps were among the first released on both iOS and Android Wear platforms — our design and engineering teams had to work together to discover initial functionality by studying the developer releases closely, and agree on scope. The biggest design challenge was visually translating the complexity of users’ calendars to an appropriate wrist-sized view. The project was accompanied by some uncertainty — at the time of our design process, no one knew if wearables were going to be successful in the marketplace, or go the way of Google Glass.
Role + team
Lead UX + UI Designer
Result
First-ever Appy Award for Best Wearable App, 2015
For the Apple Watch, we began by learning as much as possible from Apple’s Developer release about what Apple’s watch functionality consisted of. Our first lean concept focused on the watch Glance only; we sketched several different one-screen concepts, including simply showing a user their next meeting. The comps below show a few sketch approaches to showing the user how many meetings they have left in their day in countdown form.
After sketch-concepting glances, we progressed to a watch app flow map and full wireframes of the full iMeet Agenday calendar app experience adapted for the watch screen, including details screens for all permutations of meeting types.
The final Apple Watch app for iMeet Agenday features a fully swipable Agenda view as its home screen, which functions with the same pattern as the phone app — users can swipe up to view their entire day’s agenda, or left or right to view yesterday’s or tomorrow’s. Users can also tap on the arrow icons in lieu of swiping. Tapping any event cell brings up a meeting detail view with button options to connect or view the full event on the phone.
Finalized glance designs
For the Apple Watch glance feature (which is now not available), we opted for an hours/minutes/seconds countdown until the user’s next meeting. The screen changes color to indicate urgency, and shows the meeting title; tapping on the glance take the user to the event’s details screen, where they can join or take other actions. If the user has no events left or no events scheduled that day, the glance shows weather information.
Notifications
The watch app carries over Agenday’s regular Join and Morning notifications.
Testing and debut
On the right: our lead engineer tests a watch build while I watch. On the left: PGi CTO David Guthrie demos Android Wear watch functionality onstage at STAGEnext, PGi’s annual sales kickoff.
For the Android Wear version, our explorations began with a review of the developer preview materials provided by Google. After discovering the main initial functionality for Android Wear would be custom watch faces, we sketched out a few approaches and ultimately produced two simple MVP face versions: one, a simple branded face with blocked-off meeting times, and a second version featuring only a weather reading. Both Android Wear integrations included a voice command to open the phone app.
At the 2015 Appy Awards Reception, iMeet Agenday won the first-ever award for Best Wearable App.