We concluded that people wanted stylish watches, not wrist computers. And that meant you needed a watch collection with different sizes, different designs for men & women, & different designs for all-day wear vs sport. Moto360 was the result. 

This image is my personal trail of tears...an arduous journey over many years of trying to perfect a smart watch. From the huge potential of MotoACTV (a casualty of our acquisition by Google) to experimental products with a Google X team, we finally landed on Moto360 on Android Wear. Wow. It's amazing what you learn when you stick to it & treat failure like opportunity. And when a few senior leaders like Jim Wicks & Iqbal Arshad don't give up! (But I wouldn't want to go through it again.)

So after all those square, rectangular, & squircle attempts, we finally had enormous conviction that the only thing worth pursuing was round. While desparately trying to find a display vendor who would work with us, we began to do UI studies to see what round did to a UI. I was amazed at not only how great the UI looked, but how much more display you got in the same size. Just so happens that round also works a lot better on your wrist & wrist bones. (Although fitting text was a serious pain). 

This is one of my favorite images & quotes of all times, & helps me feel like I know what I'm doing! We were transitioning from the active category over to fashion, & so decided to put a chamfer on the display to look more premium, more watch-like. But that caused a slight distortion on the edges of the display. When colleagues saw this (read engineers....I love them but...) they completely freaked out. You would never distort content on a phone. You would never distort key metrics on a sport watch like MotoACTV. But my immediate reaction was - YES! It looked premium, it looked sophisticated. Who cares if it distorts anything - it looks like a sapphire lens on an expensive watch! So when this blogger came out with this quote, I wanted to find him & kiss him. Ok, well maybe not but it's an awesome quote. 

It's a watch, so watchfaces became super important. A huge amount of sweat equity went into each & every one of these watchfaces, including a hand painted floral theme for our women's line as well as a phone app for customizing all of them re color, hand styles, etc. I'm really proud of the quality of all these designs, they're just wonderfully designed. 

While fashion watches with leather or metal link bands might not be good for running, they're great for passive wellness data collection like steps, calorie burn, & heart rate data from our PPG sensor. We also innovated in the area of goal setting, choosing to focus on creating a baseline on the individuals normal activity, & then creating goals that moved that baseline up slightly every two weeks. 

Return of sport! We leveraged all we'd learned in MotoACTV, but scaled down for casual athletic use. This was the fastest design work I've ever been a part of because we'd built up so much expertise from MotoACTV.

Workout, music, & all-day step/cal goals...MotoACTV round version on a higher res screen. A couple side swipes for the most important information as well as a high-contrast, low battery display when not interacting with the display. 

We saw the opportunity to combine music with sport in the running category, & so set out to do that with MotoACTV, built on top of Android. I can't really explain the next 2-3 years appropriately, but let's just say a small team of designers & engineers just went for it & didn't give up. We made a great, modular product for running & biking & later on golf. 

We concluded that wrist alone was too limiting for the different kinds of workouts and wear-style preferences. So the device was made to slide out of the band, clip on clothing, fit into upper arm bands, and mount on handle bars. So what that meant for me was to become an expert in the various workouts, create a modular interface where different workouts could be easily chosen, and make sure the product was easy to use in the primary locations it might be found on the body or bike. We started by studying people on treadmills, then ran with runners, biked with bikers, and golfed with golfers. Every detail, from headset cable length and management to ease of mounting to handlebars to icon design of each activity, was obsessed and iterated.

We weren't just going to make a watch, but wanted to create a halo around the entire product. HR chest straps, HR sensors in headsets, Ant & BT technology, bike sensors....it was a full-bore effort to own it all & it was fantastic. We made a super compelling product offering & made a mark in the fitness space. 

Walking, outdoor running, treadmill running, ellyptical, indoor biking, outdoor cycling, & golf were the major modes on this device. I hated running, but did plenty of it for this product. One of my favorite challenges was learning how to get accurate bike data (based on type of bike, wheel size, etc.) and turn that into a UI. Even better than that was the interval training and zone training interfaces. And lastly the golf UI was exceptionally challenging to fit enough information to be useful but keep it clean and simple. 

In order to give the casual & more serious athlete all they needed we created a phone tracking app & full-featured web portal. Shout out to Chris Carmichael and his CTS group....time spent with them was hugely helpful in understanding the needs of more serious athletes.