Visualizing Information on Smartwatch Faces: A Review and Design Space

TL;DR

This paper systematically reviews visualization designs for smartwatch faces, analyzing their styles and data presentation, and proposes a design space to guide future visualization development for small displays.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive design space for smartwatch face visualizations based on an analysis of existing designs, aiding future research and design choices.

Findings

Identified key design styles and data types used in smartwatch faces

Developed a design space outlining important considerations for small display visualizations

Provided a research agenda highlighting open opportunities in smartwatch visualization design

Abstract

We present a systematic review and design space for visualizations on smartwatches and the context in which these visualizations are displayed--smartwatch faces. A smartwatch face is the main smartwatch screen that wearers see when checking the time. Smartwatch faces are small data dashboards that present a variety of data to wearers in a compact form. Yet, the usage context and form factor of smartwatch faces pose unique design challenges for visualization. In this paper, we present an in-depth review and analysis of visualization designs for popular premium smartwatch faces based on their design styles, amount and types of data, as well as visualization styles and encodings they included. From our analysis we derive a design space to provide an overview of the important considerations for new data displays for smartwatch faces and other small displays. Our design space can also serve as inspiration for design choices and grounding of empirical work on smartwatch visualization design. We end with a research agenda that points to open opportunities in this nascent research direction. Supplementary material is available at: https://osf.io/nwy2r/.