Glanceable Smartwatch Feedback Design: the Effects of Stylization, Granularity, and Salience

Self-monitoring technologies are widely used to record users' physical behaviors in health related contexts, but the design space of glanceable feedback that could provide ambient feedback to users is still under-explored. Based on prior literature, we selected three design factors, stylization, granularity, and salience, to examine their influence on people's ability to understand and interpret smartwatch-based feedback on daily step-goal attainment, as well as their impact on user experience. We conducted an online 2x2x2 factorial experiment with 233 participants on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. We found that interfaces of low stylization and interfaces of high granularity are better at providing users with adequate information while glancing at the smartwatch. There were no interaction effects between any 2 of the selected design factors and high stylization had negative impacts on subjective responses of the post-questionnaire. This study gives guidance on how to design effective glanceable feedback on smartwatches, which could encourage people to introduce more healthy behaviors in their daily lives.Master of Science in Information (MSI)School of Informationhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/168555/1/20210514_Li,Yuxuan_Final_MTOP_Thesis.pd