— Research and Discovery

Exploring Apple Human Interface Guidelines

I started the project by researching Apple Human Interface Guidelines to learn the fundamental characteristics and patterns of the iOS experience and understand how to design for iOS.

A few takeaways that I kept in mind when designing for WatchOS interface:

Prioritize Glanceability – Information should be instantly understandable, with large, legible text and clear visual hierarchy to accommodate the small screen.

Use Space Efficiently – The limited real estate requires a minimal, uncluttered interface, ensuring only the most essential actions are visible.

Keep Interactions Simple – Tasks should be quick and effortless, relying on intuitive gestures to minimize user effort.

— Ideation and Prototype

Users want to know how long the call last

From my own experience, knowing how long the phone call lasts until it goes to voicemail is important. It gives me time to prepare before picking up the call knowing that I won't miss it.
I presented this idea to the class and got feedback that other people find it a great feature to have.

I started the ideation phase by sketching the interface to brainstorm ideas and visualize how the interaction might look like. I came up with several ideas:

01 – Incorporating a circular progress bar with the receive button.

02 – Putting the progress bar on the outer edge of the interface.

03 – Adding a progress bar with a voicemail button to signal when the call goes to voicemail.

I also wanted to include motion to call more attention to the answer option. Therefore, I couldn't incorporate the progress bar here. The second approach of putting the progress bar on the outer edge is also not effective since this bar will have no association with the duration of the phone call, causing confusion.

I  went ahead with the third idea of adding a separate progress bar that leads to a voicemail signal.

However, after receiving feedback, I realized that this approach would occupy a lot of the valuable real estate and potentially clutter the watch interface. I got back to the drawing board to generate more ideas and create prototypes.

— Final Design

In the final design, the progress bar for the duration of the phone call was moved to the bottom of the interface so not to occupy much space. The solution also makes more sense since it depicts the time running out until the hang up button turns into the voicemail button signaling that the caller is leaving a voicemail. I came up with this solution after doing research and noticing that once the call is transferred into voicemail, the users can still pick up the phone call, but the hang up button is deactivated at this point.

After presenting this solution and getting a second round of feedback, I realized that the fading hang up button does not make much sense and the voicemail icon flashing together with the green pickup button is distracting. I then revised it and got to the final design.