Wearable Products: Beginning of a new era
Wearable devices are electronic devices that can be worn on the body by a user. Some examples of the recent devices are smartwatches, google glass, activity trackers or fitness bands etc. These devices can at times work in tandem with smartphones or may also work independently. Smartphones as product are matured and are very good at what they do. Wearables should be complementary devices to Smartphones and not a replacement in any way. Wearables should try to do things that smartphones are not particularly good at.
What smartphones have?
- Big beautiful screens
- Great processing power
- Bigger batteries
- Bigger speakers
- Users are used to handle smartphones.
Smartphones are information consumption and communication devices. Pulling out a smartphone for these purposes is a relatively good experience. A wearable device should not try to do same things that a smartphone is already good at doing.
Entertainment, productivity, communication are all handled very well by bigger screen and more processing power of smartphones and a smaller device on the wrist cannot compete in these areas.
The biggest advantage of a wearable over a smartphone is that by definition it is an extension of the user. It is not an external device anymore. It is the first step towards implicitly connecting human beings electronically to the rest of the world. Yes, I am hinting at implants but that’s a different discussion. Wearables, such as Google glass are trying too hard too soon to make us work like a cyborg. I am not sure the market is ready yet to make that transition. It may very well happen in future that we function like Iron man or Robocop, but now is certainly not the right time.
The point I am trying to make is that wearables should not be data consumption devices, rather they should be primarily data accumulation devices. Collecting implicit data about the user that a smartphone otherwise cannot accumulate so well.
Wearables, by definition are “always-on” devices even more than a smartphone. Thus are in the best place to connect us to our surroundings. There can be innumerable IOT applications for wearables, such as health related, connecting the user to its home/office, security related and a lot more.
The wearable product managers should ensure atleast 2 things are working flawlessly
- Always-ON
- Data accumulation
Product managers should ensure that the user should be wearing the product all the time. Which means, there should not be any reasons for user to remove the device from its body. Some of the potential reasons could be
- Frequent battery discharge
- Unpleasant aesthetics
- Insufficient functionality
A good wearable device would be one with seamless experience which pushes the technology in the background and enriches users life.
Wearables are a new product category and like all consumer electronic devices they will take their own sweet time to mature. Let’s hope to see some exciting products in this category very soon.
