Design Recommendations to Improve The User Interaction with Wrist Worn Devices

Wrist worn devices (WWDs) including fitness trackers and smart watches have been successfully employed to support various applications, ranging from gesture recognition to authentication. Despite the increasing number of WWDs in the market, their limited dimensions and capabilities make their interaction design challenging. Designers struggle to downsize interactions originally designed for mobile phones, and end users wish for interactions that are easy to use. To better understand the users’ concerns regarding the interaction with WWDs, we collected feedback about existing wearable bands, and analyzed the most critical issues currently faced in the interaction with such devices. The analysis of the findings enabled us to derive 10 design recommendations that can aid to improve the interaction design in novel WWDs