Outlook for Android Wear
Know what's next, at a glance.
Product Designer | UX Program Manager
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Microsoft
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2016
Shipped the Outlook app and interactive watch face for Android Wear, extending the wearable experience beyond Apple Watch.
Problem
Outlook’s job is helping people know what’s next, and the Apple Watch work had shown that wearables could deliver it at a glance. Android Wear was the natural next surface: it complemented Outlook on Android and could improve on the native mail and calendar apps. The platform differed from Apple Watch in meaningful ways (third-party apps could supply their own watch faces) and, like any emerging category, it came with sparse usage data and real stability and performance constraints.
Approach
Lessons from shipping on Apple Watch shaped the plan, adjusted for platform differences. Notifications and the watch face were again the primary use cases, so I concentrated effort on the watch face, since third-party apps could build their own. Early designs leaned on elaborate watch-face interaction; usability feedback pushed toward a more glanceable model that asked less of the user.
Process
Watch face
The watch face shows the next 12 hours as arcs on the dial, colored to match the calendars set up in Outlook on the phone. The next event sits front and center (time remaining and location) alongside a count of mail received since you last checked.
Notifications
Early explorations put swipe actions on the collapsed card and the full email on expand, which didn’t fit Android Wear 1.0 conventions. Notifications were filtered to important mail, with tap to read and swipe to archive, flag, or reply; event reminders surface the details and let you tell the organizer you’re running late.
Outcome
Shipped the Android Wear app and an interactive watch face for Outlook, with continuous bi-weekly updates. The watch face differentiated Outlook from the native mail and calendar apps and extended the know-what’s-next experience to Android users.
Watch Face
Mail notification
Mail notification
Calendar reminder
Calendar reminder
Lessons
Carrying lessons from one platform to the next sped the work, but platform conventions matter: the more elaborate notification model we set aside resembled the one Android Wear itself adopted a version later.