Apple is likely to release the long awaited Apple Watch in April this year. There has been a lot of speculation around how the watch will integrate into the iOS system. We still need to find out how the watch will perform battery wise and if it will only be another gimmick watch (as many of them seem to be these days).
A big question will be how Apple integrates 3rd part apps on the Apple Watch and how the app designers design them. Traditionally companies do a good job with their own integrated apps but either do not support or have crappy 3rd party apps avaiable on the watch platform. Well a few talented designers have given their input into 3rd party app design.
The Letter Society is a design collaborative and blog that instigates regular creative challenges. Previous challenges have included band posters, family crests, stamps, and some rather creative redesigns of the famously stark Google homepage. The 20th challenge to its design community was to “œcreate a use for the new Apple Watch.“ A tall order, to be filled before the “œmarket is flooded with endless adaptations of applications.“ Here are some of the contributions:
Uber
Ryan Brownhill, a 22-year-old designer at IBM in Austin, chose Uber for the design challenge. His focus was aimed at the ability to seamlessly move from the watch to iPhone and back. The Apple Watch Uber concept was therefore designed as an extension to the app, “not the entire app crammed into your wrist.” Some of the more intricate features like splitting fares and profiles are therefore left to the smartphone. 
Swarm (FourSquare)
Nathan Boyd, a 24-year-old designer living in Southern California, wants to make Swarm (by FourSquare) useful on the wrist while avoiding “pointless minifications” of the existing app. To enable this, he focuses on easy check-in, sticker usage, and location selection allowing Foursquare users to leave their phones pocketed.
Google Translate
Fran Palmer, a 25-year-old designer at FCB in Chicago took on the Google Translate app. Turning your Apple Watch into a James-Bond communication device is probably on top of everybody’s “what i want to do with my smartwatch” list. The app will do simple spoken and written word translations while a hard tap on the Watch will save a translation for quick access later.
It will be interesting to see how people react to this kind of app. It is easy for you to contact HQ through your watch but it is quite another thing asking a waiter to speak to your watch because you don’t know the Spanish words for “burger and chips please”.
Check out some of the other concepts on the Letter Society page.
Source: TheVerge
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