The main criticism of wearables is that it’s an solution in search of a problem. The following needs to be true for a “smartwatch” to make sense.
- It needs to do something other than tell time
- The thing it does needs to be short – faster than taking our phone out, unlocking it, and opening an app (5-10 seconds?)
- The thing it does needs to happen enough times throughout the day to justify another device that needs to be charged and updated (5-10 times a day?)
- Bonus points if the thing it does gets data from being physically attached to you
Current State of Affairs
Health and fitness fits these requirements. Fitbit, Jawbone, and Fuelband are all active, and providing value. That market was worth $238 million in 2013. That’s a great business for those involved, but it’s not big enough to be a game-changer the way the the iPod or iPhone was. Too many of us are lazy and don’t actually want to exercise more.
In search of a bigger market, Google’s Android Wear strategy has been to make the watch an interface to Google Now. That’s pretty smart, Google Now’s key value is providing information before you even know you need it. Google also takes advantage of their voice recognition to allow you to speak to the watch so it doesn’t need a keyboard.
The main reservation I have is that it requires the prospective buyer to trust Google Now. Trust that it will provide enough updates throughout the day, and trust that the updates it provides are relevant and valuable. I as the wearer don’t initiate many of these actions, the watch does.
The case for To-Do lists
The smartwatch needs one marquee interaction that I as the wearer initiate. That’s why the to-do list is perfect. It’s something small and fast. The whole purpose of jotting down a to-do is for it to happen quickly, and then not have to think about it again. These things arise regularly throughout the day:
- a new task that comes up during a meeting
- an idea you have when walking around that you don’t want to forget
- remember that you need to add something to your shopping list
- agreeing to meet someone but not wanting to go actually make a calendar event
In these use cases, the watch is more than a to-do list, it’s a personal assistant. This is what we had hoped Siri would be. You could tell it something on your mind, and not have to think about it again, and it would tell you about things you needed to know based on your earlier inputs.
Why hasn’t this happened yet?
If Google had Siri or Apple had Google Now, this would be obvious to either company. Why don’t they?
Benedict Evans is fond of saying that Google wants to make the hardware a dumb terminal to a smart cloud, and Apple wants to make the cloud plumbing to support native apps. I like this framework. Task lists feel like a small feature that that doesn’t take advantage of the Google firehose. Apple arguably doesn’t have the tech or the data to do Google Now properly. Throw into there the fact that Apple hasn’t opened Siri up to 3rd party devs, and you get a reasonable answer to why this hasn’t happened yet.
Google can wait on Evernote or Wunderlist to integrate to the Android Wear API, but for this feature to be part of the sell of the device, it really needs to be built in natively. To-do lists are also not easy, everyone has their own idea of what the proper workflow looks like. You really need an Apple level of design refinement to navigate a set of defaults that works well enough for everyone, and then open up the API to allow 3rd party apps to fill in the gaps.
Problems with this theory
I really wanted to show some big download numbers for task lists in the productivity app section of the app store. I remember them being strong both in the productivity section and overall on the app store when the app store first launched, but the current store is all communication apps and games.
That’s okay though. I’ll play the “change changer” card and assert that the ability to save tasks by talking to your wrist is a game changer. People have wanted this, and missed this, and just didn’t realize that they needed this interaction to be super-fast and voice activated.