Thanks to Dhrumil Patel and Carolina Li for their help in creating this blog post.
Videos like Can you really tell if a kid is lying and posts like Smartwatch can detect early signs of illness impressed upon me a game-changing potential for wearables to make diagnoses more accurate and prognoses more reliable. When I won an Apple Watch at a hackathon, I was very excited to try it out. I understood that the medical tech that I’d wanted to see wouldn’t become mainstream until the data collected by the watch was accepted by the medical community. Nevertheless, I wanted to try it out.
It felt familiar since I also had an iphone and the aesthetic is very similar. There were some ridiculous notifications reminding me to breathe but I appreciated its reminders to get up and move around. It had to be paired to my phone and be physically close enough to my phone to use all its features - i.e. I generally had to have my phone on me if I wanted to use most of the interesting features.
Every now and then, I’d get a message from a friend or a notification about an email. I’d look down at my hand, try to read it on the watch and usually, try to respond back. But it’s not easy to respond back on the device unless I can draw or speak which isn’t always easy or possible. It’s usually faster for me to just pull out my phone. If I’m going to pull out my phone anyway, I might as well read the message on my phone too. I’m not so busy that I can’t pull out my phone to shave off 500 ms. I’m not dismissive of what that 500 ms means: it represents a more human way to consume information. As Pranav Mistry says in his phenomenal ted talk: “[humans are] not interested in technology, we’re interested in information.” To that point, I have very few qualms about remaining human. Eventually though, the watch’s use became limited to triaging events. I liked having that ability to easily triage events because it was easier to gauge how urgent a message was and whether I needed to interrupt my current flow to deal with it. I rarely missed a message and felt more connected to my friends as a result.
Wearing a smart watch imposed expectations about my availability. This reminds me of a friend who only answered messages when he got back home. It created an expectation that he was only available during certain parts of the day. If I wanted to have a synchronous rousing philosophical discussion with him, I knew that there was only a particular block of time when he’d be available for that. Texting/mailing/emailing/etc. made our conversations asynchronous and these technologies created and shifted expectations about how we interact with one another. However, instant messaging, with read receipts, has shifted those asynchronous expectations for messaging - some of my friends expect a quick answer and some don’t care when I respond (so long as it’s within a bounded period). I try to reciprocate that behaviour, but I might not have the same schedule as the person trying to talk with me. Moreover, I’m not entitled to anyone’s time so I need to be careful that I don’t impose the very expectations I’ve disparaged in this blog post.
Seeing a smart watch on my wrist shifted my friends’ expectations about when I’d be able to see their messages. Before I put on the watch: if I were busy, I could still look at my phone and continue working if the message didn’t seem urgent - e.g. “Look at this cute cat!”. Not to say I’m an inattentive friend that doesn’t like cats but I’d like to sincerely make good on my prior commitments. After putting on the watch, there was an expectation that I would at least acknowledge the message whenever my wrist vibrated, which is hard to ignore. The expectation was that I was always available and I noticed I was significantly more productive without a watch. I stopped wearing the watch and I got more productive.
I ‘discovered’ Focus Time on Google calendar recently. Focus Time blocks notifications during user-defined periods. However, the sender doesn’t necessarily know if they’re sending a message during someone else’s focus time. The sender might put two and two together but I’d rather not let that be misinterpretated. This is an engineering problem, though, and not an indictment of the concept of Focus Time.
More generally, this post is not an indictment of the technology. On the contrary, I’m a big fan of wearables and I see a lot of potential. Even now, I wear the watch when I go hiking and it’s useful as a fitness tracker (and it tells the time, unlike this :P). Rather, it’s an indictment of the expectations the watch creates, how that changes my behaviour and ultimately how the product and the infrastructure surrounding it needs to be more mature and provide more value to justify those expectations.
In my myopic opinion, I haven’t seen a feature in the watch (Series 3) that absolutely compels me to use it. It doesn’t provide enough value to me to justify the expectations it creates and the change in my behaviour. It’s clear it provides enough value to millions. Most likely, the ubiquity of the watch will change how we interact with each other. There are many different products and services that have a similar problem: they impose changes to your behaviour but don’t add proportionate value (blog post coming up).
There’s a larger point about communication: as our collective expectations shift, so do the behaviours we’re used to seeing. For example, consider how expectations for receiving goods have changed due to faster shipping methods. A few decades ago, waiting two weeks for a mail-order product to arrive was completely normal, and no one would be upset by such a delay. However, with the advent of next-day and even same-day delivery services, it’s now common to feel frustrated or consider a retailer unreliable if a package takes more than a few days to arrive. The technology and infrastructure that enable quicker turnaround times have shifted the collective expectation, making previously acceptable waiting periods feel unreasonably long.
There are parallels to early-stage technologies that didn’t have the right product fit in the beginning but were ultimately revolutionary. I liken smart watches to modern cars without modern roads. They’re great technologies but without the infrastructure (expectations, confidence in medical capabilities, usage in payments, etc.) they’re just expensive jewelry (I imagine that’s the point of jewelry in certain circles). I feel similarly towards Tesla’s Autopilot. It’s nowhere near autonomy (pg 4) but the ambitious and misleading name (AutoPilot) and the timeline of promises surrounding it suggest it’s closer to autonomy whereas it’s really closer to ADAS. The technology simply isn’t at the stage touted by senior leadership but it forms expectations that could prove to be deadly. The auto industry has this problem in general, although they’re more honest with their jargon. Some are introducing advanced ADAS features (e.g. lane assist) where the user can let go of the steering wheel so long as they stay vigilant and continue looking at the road - i.e. these features take away autonomy from the user with the promise of convenience. It’s up to car owners on deciding whether that’s a good bargain. I’d argue that because they’re more honest with their naming and marketing, expectations for the feature don’t exceed the features themselves: car owners have a better idea of what the limitations of their vehicles are and can make an informed decision.