Comment by Osmium | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Osmium | Hacker News Reader

From the recent New Yorker profile of Jonny Ive:

> The shape of the body, meanwhile, barely changed: a rectangle with rounded corners. “When a huge part of the function is lists”—of names, or appointments—“a circle doesn’t make any sense,” Ive said. Its final form resembles one of Newson’s watches, and the Cartier Santos, from 1904.

I think circular watches, in principle, look a lot nicer (certainly in ads), but that quote was the first thing I thought of when I saw the Facebook screenshot[1]. I think Apple might have this one right.

[1] http://consumer.huawei.com/minisite/worldwide/huawei-watch/a...

Edit: Ah, didn't see acqq just said this exact thing. "You can scroll" isn't a solution to this though. There's a big difference between being able to read a message from a glance at a wrist to having to physically interact with the device. The more interaction you need, the less benefit you have with the watch over just taking your phone out.

I think this might be an example of Ive's lack of experience in UX versus industrial design is showing. Not saying he doesn't know UX but it isn't his primary mode of operation. Or they simply didn't have time to do a circular UI.

I'm a big believer that the best smart watches will be round. A circle is more aesthetically pleasing than a rectangle. More importantly it has better ergonomics and you could do things like rotate the watch face according to hand position.

Lots of content looks really well when encapsulated by a circle since it looks more "organic". Photos, faces, maps, time. It's a little bit worse for chunks of text however but most snippets displayed like a SMS should be pretty short.

There's also a huge opportunity to use a rotatable bezel as tactile complement to a touch screen, making zooming, and scrolling easier. Being excellent for things like "dial selectors" and preventing smudges and being all around easier to find, grip and manipulate than the screen or a crown. Having invented the scroll wheel for the iPod for nearly the exact same reasons one would think Apple would be wise to this fact.

So what about the claim that it should be rectangle because "a huge function is lists". I think this simple is lack of imagination on the UX part. You have to think of the main purposes for a watch, as a complement but not replacement for a phone.

I actually don't see many scenarios where you'd want to browse through large lists or wall of texts on your watch. In most cases you want to view small nuggets of information and do some basic manipulation. In many cases I think "scrolling" could be replaced by for instance simply switching the whole circle content and having some indicator in the perimeter.

I suspect however the reason that both Android and Apple is going primary the rectangular route is that it does however require more imagination and radically different UI's than a phone, and time weren't on their side to do that quite yet.

I wouldn't be surprised if most if not all smartwatches in the future are circular

Android Wear is specifically designed to avoid this problem. You get a series of glance-able cards that you can swipe through for more information or actions. In maybe one or two places (the Settings app) do you actually get a list view, and they are all one-line entries that fit easily on a round screen.

Apple's philosophy toward the smartwatch experience is just different. Android Wear is all about contextual notifications and glanceable information. What we've seen of Apple Watch is smartphone apps scaled down. I'm sure it will be very powerful and well-designed, just not my cup of tea.

Still, the actual "usable" area on a circular watch is the square within.

Somehow I can read emails and reply to texts just fine. And people don't ask me about the calculator on my wrist.

Or a circular aperture could naturally be viewed as a "spy hole". Why not use the gyros, the fact that the watch is on a movable limb, and there is typically a single viewer, to fake up a holograpic view, whereby a virtual screen is bigger than the watch and the user sees the whole screen by moving their wrist relative to their eyes.

I think circular watches, in principle, look a lot nicer

It's worth mentioning that the roundness of watches came from their history of being miniaturised clocks, which standardised on the analogue dial with rotating hands for its display. Making the watch round to fit its display made sense, and people got used to round watches as being the norm.

Looking at it that way, a round smartwatch seems like an anachronism; there's no reason they have to be made round, and the technology behind them favours making them rectangular. Saying that smartwatches are better round is sort of like saying that LCDs should be made in the same circular or semi-spherical shape that CRTs were.

Telephones have also changed in shape, from the earliest "two sticks" design with separate transmitter/receiver, the symmetrically-shaped handset that remains common for landlines, and the mobile phones that gradually evolved from that shape to the rectangular slabs of smartphones today.

Thus, much like smartphones look nothing like traditional telephones, I don't think it's necessarily true that smartwatches will need to be round.

Physical comfort plays into the round design, and the cycling nature of our time-standards feeds into how we choose to display it.

(my 360 has a 'bezel' which rotates to show daylight and appointments at TDC, for example, and it's not really skeuomprphic or overly fancy)

> read a message from a glance at a wrist

Do you expect to read all messages you get from a glance? How about emails? In fact, many messages you get won't be fully visible on the screen at one time - so what's the difference? Crucially - who is to say that text is all that can be conveyed when "glancing" at a watch? These things are not kindles.

I'll tell ya, I've owned both a square and a round Android Wear device. Forgetting the comparison to the Apple Watch, I much prefer the round Moto 360 to the square LG. Aside from the aesthetics - ironically, the circular display seems like it fits more on the screen, not less.

Luckily with Android you've got a choice, and the Android Wear team has built great APIs to handle both screen types.

As jwz has it, 'Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.' I don't think he meant this as an endorsement.

I don't want to read things on my watch - I want one that I just look at it, and where the circular frame is the basis of the design, so it's either a simple thing within that like a face with a call icon, or some sort of radial display like a clock, or some more abstract interfaces like sections or bubbles. It will take a little time for a new visual grammar to emerge.

I window if the pixels are square or hexagonal; probably the former, but the emergence of the latter seems only a matter of time.

I window if the pixels are square

Leider geil

There's a decent amount of spin behind that statement. For one thing, none of the interfaces Apple have shown us actually have lists.

I wouldn't be surprised if version 2 or 3 of the Apple Watch changes to a round design.

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