UX and Health wearables

In the past few years, the health wearables sector has transformed due to the introduction of impressive technology like Fitbit, Apple Watch, Galaxy Fit, Mi Band, and many more. Wearable devices are forecasted to hit 1.1 billion by 2022 therefore companies need to optimize their apps for the masses. These watches or fitness bands have interactive software and apps which help users in tracking their data. This means that these apps should be simple to use and integrate with existing devices (like Smartphones) so that users don’t have a seamless experience every time they need to quickly find necessary data or functions. Users should be able to navigate through the app and perform tasks like updating their step targets, updating the BMI, or take an incoming call during health activities, etc.

How can businesses ensure that the app is user-friendly and easy to use? As a unique aspect of wearables, the ecosystem involves several hardware and software. The experience on the Hardware side does constitute wearability aspects. The hardware experience involves multi-sensory aspects of human factors engineering, safety, size and shape, color and maintenance. To create the best wearable experience, Industrial designers need to work with UX designers.

The goal of designers in this ecosystem is to create superior visceral, behavioral and reflective levels of emotional experience. On the App interaction side, building a successful health wearable UX design requires the UX designers to properly prioritize information in the associated phone apps too. To do that, they need to collect some data through usability testing. Usability Testing is a UX testing technique where an application(s) are tested to determine if they are Useful, easy to Navigate, Accessible, Usable, & Desirable. In essence, it ensures that the end-product satisfies users’ demands and can deliver a consistent & seamless user experience.

How Health Wearables can benefit from Usability research  

1. Useful Insights: Through usability testing these companies will be able to find out the problems that their users are facing and hence will be able to work around them to create a seamless experience. 
   
2. Prototype testing:  Through UXArmy's UX toolkit these companies can test their next-gen prototypes or updates easily and make sure that the updates and new features are Useful, easy to Navigate, Accessible, and Usable.
   
3. Competitor Analysis: Health Wearable companies can test their competitor's app, analyze data and find out the areas their competitors are excelling at. They can then replicate the learnings from the study into their app.
   
4. New Features: Current user problems can result in new and innovative features of tomorrow. You can integrate a survey with the usability test. The insights can trigger new ideas for features that can solve those problems. For example, MI Band was launched with limited functionality but because of constant user feedback, it now supports more sports modes and has features like viewing notifications, alarms, etc. 
   
5. Ethical Design: Since wearables by nature are more personal / invasive than other gadgets (for instance, a smartphone) the ethical design aspects like privacy and user benefits need to be paid special attention right from concept stage instead of an afterthought. For those reasons, usability research and feedback collection becomes far more important in wearable health-tech devices and apps than in other less invasive gadgets.
   

Conclusion 

In UX design, it all boils down to keep grounded to the basics. The same is true for wearable devices, their interactions with other devices and the user. Understanding the target audience with speed, to a great degree of detail and securing usability feedback from them is vital to create a user-centric strategy. Understanding the nuances of user behaviour is beyond the analytics and statistics. By incorporating usability testing from concept, prototyping to development and post release, the chances of success become exponentially higher.

Health wearables is a growing market and it can benefit a lot from Usability testing. UXArmy offers a full 360 degree of usability testing solutions and can help companies like Samsung, Xiaomi, One Plus, Fit Bit, etc. in developing next-gen applications and UI for their users. To check out our offerings click here .