w.calc - wearable calculator [Apple Watch]

#BlastFromThePast
w.calc - wearable calculator. One of my real points of pride in UX.

Let's get back to April 2015. Apple has just released its first wearable device - Apple Watch.

The goal of the Apple Watch was to complement an iPhone, add new functions, and to free people from their phones. Kevin Lynch (VP of Technology at Apple) said: "People are carrying their phones with them and looking at the screen so much. People want that level of engagement. But how do we provide it in a way that's a little more human, a little more in the moment when you're with somebody?" This is how a smartwatch project born.

In May 2015, we got one of the first developer-preview watches. Amazing device, full of technologies inside! But what a surprise was for me to understand that Apple Watch doesn't have a built-in calculator. The problem for somebody, but a real opportunity for developers. This is how the w.calc idea was born.

Doing design and development for smartphones with touch screens, you get used to the idea that you need to make all interface easily clickable by fingers and intuitive enough. But the peculiarity of Apple Watch, that screen is five times smaller than in iPhone, and at one moment user physically can't do several operations. It adds some strict restrictions to your interfaces.

Exploring watchOS SDK, I found out that pages with horizontal swipes are widely-used in all default apps. And came an idea, what if we split digits and operations into different pages. It was the key decision for this app. Playing with different layouts, I found out that 10 digits on one page are more than enough to input all numbers, and easy swipe right opens you all primary operations (+, -, x, / ). Ok, if it's so easy, why not to add one more page with advanced operations (pow, sin, cos, fact, etc.). This is how 3-pages navigation was born. The moto of the project was, "All your operations just in one swipe from you".
What's more, Apple Watch had disruptive for that time feature - Force Touch. You can access it by pressing hard on the screen. To this screen, were moved additional features, like Rand numbers, Pi number, and All Clear.

After a month of development and testing, "w.calc - wearable calculator" was officially launched on App Store: Watch. For the first several months, we got more than 10k installs and an overall rating of 4.9. In the next updates, we added custom themes (like watch faces) that could be installed from your phone. Unfortunately, in a year, we had to remove the app from the store because of the conflict with our employer. He had all the rights for this software project and took his account with all the apps down. I'm pretty sure that this product could be very successful in the future because it was one of the first for Apple Watch (launched the same time when the device has been released), had brilliant UX, and was powered by additional useful features. We had everything to be featured by Apple.