Designing the first mainstream smartwatch
As an early leader in wearables, Pebble got a huge amount of feedback from a passionate community of early adopters. We wanted to add a lot of functionality, refresh the visual brand, and rebuild onboarding to a much higher standard of usability. As the first UX designer at Pebble, I led those efforts.
The companion mobile app had been designed entirely by engineers, so we started over. First we sketched the screens we knew the experience needed, then worked out the content and hierarchy, and then the interactions and flows between screens, including moments like downloading an app onto your watch. We treated iOS and Android as separate but related projects.
The first version of the companion app had been designed entirely by engineers, so we started the redesign by sketching layouts of the screens we knew the experience needed.
Once we were past the requirements conversations and knew how many screens we wanted, we took a more detailed pass at what each screen would contain, including the supporting navigational elements.
Once the high-fidelity decisions were settled, we built a UI kit to carry them into development. It held the components, states and measurements that engineers would otherwise have had to guess from a mockup.
Developers needed a way to submit new apps, update them, track their approval states, and more. We also provided a UI template to help them visualize how and where their apps and related content would get displayed in our store.
Submission is the moment a developer finds out what the store expects from them, so we stated every asset requirement inline, right at the field that needs it: icon sizes, banner counts, screenshot dimensions and character limits. The preview shows the exact places those assets will appear.
Most of the people using the store and the watch guidelines were developers we would never meet, so the UI guidelines and the store template mattered as much as the app itself. We also sat down with partners like Uber and eBay to help them imagine what their own Pebble apps could be.