Samsung: Wearables

One of the most interesting projects I have worked on at Samsung is designing for its wearables. Gear S2, which is the successor to Gear S, is a complete redesign with a circular watch face and a ring around the watch face called bezel.

The bezel allows users unimpeded access to information while navigating between screens. It also provides a tactile feedback along with a clicking sound when rotated. The bezel supports quick navigation; turning the bezel faster allows quicker navigation to the desired screen whereas slower rotation supports precise interactions within the screen. The illustration below provides a overview of the benefits on this new interaction.

Given the new circular bezel, along with 2 hardware buttons, one acting as the home key and the other a back key, my challenge was to design the interface conforming with the industrial design of the device.

I, along with a team of designers from Samsung HQ in Seoul, got on to the task of defining the basic interactions of the device. We had multiple brainstorming session and usability testing to find out the most intuitive interactions with the bezel. We explored various questions such as, given a screen which contains a body of text, what would be the most basic action that the user could do with the bezel? We looked at the Gear S for informing the different kinds on screens and interactions. With this exploration we were able to create the 3 most basic interactions for the bezel; navigation between screens, scrolling down lists or body of text, and adjusting values such as volume and brightness.

Not only was the bezel a new component of the design, but it was also the first time we were designing for a circular screen. We had to imagine new layouts and graphical elements that worked best with the hardware specs. Below are a few key screens that illustrate the final layout.

Overall, this project was one of the most challenging but also the most rewarding project that I have been part of at Samsung. Gear S2 was successfully launched and we received rave reviews from the tech industries as well as the end users of the smartwatch. The project continues to evolve with the first software update just being rolled out.