How to make a better analog watch
christiankaula.com
christiankaula.com
You also mentioned having a separate minute dial. That also exists. There are watches with multiple dials, some for the seconds, others have dials solely for stopwatch functionality (chronograph watches).
Ultimately, I sort of see what you are saying, but I think if you do some research, you'll see solutions do exist.
Also, part of what makes people love watches (including myself) is the engineering behind them and the beauty of their design. For accuracy and functionality, I'll take my G-Shock over any analog (and automatic/mechanical) watch. However, I don't wear a watch purely for accuracy and functionality. They provide a bit of both, but there is more to it.
Oh, and I mentioned why I don't like the multi-dial approach: your eye still has to search for the hand. There simply is more eye movement involved in reading an analog watch, which is exactly the thing I tried to present a solution for.
Yes digital watches do exactly what I want. But why can't there be something like an "analog digital" watch? A watch that is stylish and has the "I could make one of those" thing going for it while still being as effectively readable as a digital one.
The idea I tried to describe in the post (though poorly it seems) is this: Don't make the hands of the watch move but move the dial below. This way your eyes won't have to do searching because they always know where to look for the hand. Now if you have separate dials for hour and minute you will have exactly two places to look at - and those will never change position - like with a digital watch.
Your ideas for watches make me want to actively avoid -before I've even seen them - any websites you've been involved in.
You show a fundamental lack of understanding about how people read time that I think you would fail hard with something more complex.
The analogue style face has lasted so long because it is so easy to use. Catching a ball involves a bunch of tricky physics (we've only just developed robots that can do it well) but people don't have to think about it; you throw a ball at them and they jab their arm out. (If they're anything like me they miss the ball.) People don't need to think about watches to tell the time.
There are a few special cases: Young people learning to tell the time, or people with some interesting number-blindness problems, or people with mild learning disabilities.
I'd be interested to hear designs that help those people. But, really, digital watches already exist and are a cheap and simple fix.
This simpleness is what appeals to most in analog watches - there are no chips involved (at least in mechanical analog watches). You can "get" an analog watch, understand it. There is nothing to get about computer chips. Those things are black boxes of electronic magic to most.
Furthermore just because you are fast at using something doesn't say anything about the quality of the thing you are using. You can learn to live with pretty much any level of pain. And that's why you don't have to actively think about reading a watch. It's a learned thing - just like catching a ball. And still people invented the baseball glove.