Wearable is the latest tech trend, which is becoming a daily need today. By 2022, there will be 1105 million connected wearable devices worldwide. This data is enough to convey consumer’s interest in buying more wearables, because wearable devices are not just smart devices to play games, check messages, and check time. Wearables are also your health companion as they regularly monitor your heartbeats, calories, kilometers you run, recommend exercises, and produce your Electrocardiogram (ECG) reports on-the-go. Wearables are smart enough to show what’s good for your health, which exercise you should follow, or what to have for dinner tonight.

Wearable gadgets should be fancy and intelligent that is why Samsung Galaxy Watch is one of the best wearable gadgets. Samsung Galaxy Watch shows accurate health monitoring data and has amazing looks, and this is because it is powered with Tizen. Tizen is one of the largest platform for wearable gadgets. Tizen’s robustness, simplicity, openness, and strengths make the platform unique. That is why maximum Samsung Galaxy Watches run on Tizen. Apps that run on Tizen wearable platform are quick and easy to adopt. The main reason for this is the design principle that adheres to achieve a quick and accurate response.

While building apps for Tizen wearable platform you need to take care of UX, icons, number of taps, and much more. Following are the five tips that will help you build apps for Tizen wearable:

Recommended User Experience

(Image Source: Samsung.com)

To develop an app for wearable it is important to provide a simple and friendly User Experience. Always use the recommended elements as per the design guidelines. For example, if you are inserting a button, use it proportionally for the recommended dimensions, as buttons are benchmarked for minimum 60 x 60 dimensions on Tizen wearable platform. You can use Circular UX or Bezel-less UX as per your requirements. Keep the experience that is already familiar to users, such as moving bezels to scroll, volume up/down, and navigate from an option to another.

Design for Glance

(Image source: Pixabay.com)
 

A consumer looks at the wearable screen at a glance. Also, wearables have limited screen size, especially for Samsung Galaxy Watches screen sizes are 1.2 inches/1.3 inches (Galaxy Watch) and 1.1 inches (Galaxy Watch Active), where you should not keep many items in a single frame. So keep your content and call-to-actions in the center. Also, use a combination of single vector graphic icon and single word text with limited style. Make sure that the texts and icons are aligned properly and deliver the same message. Avoid any reflection effect in the vector icons and text colors, as from a glance, reflection effect could make the content non-readable. In other words, keep information and actions simple, clear, and readable.

Feedback and Notifications

(Image Source: Samsung.com)
 

Any feedback response to the user input should be instant and natural using visuals, sounds, haptic, and vibration responses. While building your app use different visuals, LED options, vibrations, and sounds that keep the user updated and engaged more in the app. Use haptic responses with vibration and sound, but not for too long as that will quickly drain out the battery. Using color opacity, resize content, LED lighting, and scale screen are good ways to register an action response. Ensure that you use these different styles of notifications to show aesthetics of the app that benefits users to enhance their lifestyle.

Prefer Platform API over Third Party API

(Image Source: Pexels.com)

Tizen platform is responsive in its own nature as all the default UI elements are standardized. Tizen platform is benchmarked according to the Galaxy Wearable devices that help in providing the most accurate information for health monitoring. So make sure that you use the default and standardized APIs like Bluetooth, GPS, heart rate monitor, or music player to achieve the best performance for your app. Avoid using third party APIs as they may not be benchmarked according to the Tizen Wearable ecosystem. Also, specify all the privileges in the manifest.xml file so that you can access everything accurately.

Battery and Resource Consumption

(Image Source:: Pixabay.com)

Limit resource consumption by using sensors, Bluetooth, NFC, and other resources only when they are required. Also, avoid heavy jobs on the home screen to decrease load time. Tizen has this beauty to batch the data if the screen is idle and show relevant information when the screen is turned on. So optimize your app in such a way that it delivers information only when the user needs it. Consider the key information that users want from your app and how to deliver the information within few milliseconds.

To save the battery use dark color pallet, such as usage of black, blue, orange, brown, grey, and many more, whereas keep a consistent color theme across the app to maintain visual  continuity. Also, these colors render fast on a screen so that you can achieve low latency to load your app or content.

For any wearable app there are two aspects that are most important, first is the idea that you deliver to the customer, which should be solely yours, and second is the performance with great user experience. With these tips, you can surely achieve the better UX and performance that will embrace your idea to another level.