Visualizing Information on Watch Faces: A Survey with Smartwatch Users

Alaul Islam (1) , Anastasia Bezerianos (2) , Bongshin Lee (3) , Tanja Blascheck (4) , Petra Isenberg (1)

1 AVIZ - Analysis and Visualization
2 ILDA - Interacting with Large Data
3 Microsoft Research [Redmond]
4 Universität Stuttgart [Stuttgart]

People increasingly wear smartwatches that can track a wide variety of data. However, it is currently unknown which data people consume and how it is visualized. To better ground research on smartwatch visualization, it is important to understand the current use of these representation types on smartwatches, and to identify missed visualization opportunities. We present the findings of a survey with 237 smartwatch wearers, and assess the types of data and representations commonly displayed on watch faces. We found a predominant display of health & fitness data, with icons accompanied by text being the most frequent representation type. Combining these results with a further analysis of online searches of watch faces and the data tracked on smartwatches that are not commonly visualized, we discuss opportunities for visualization research. Supplementary material is available at https://osf.io/nwy2r/.

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Human-Computer Interaction [cs.HC]

Alaul Islam, Anastasia Bezerianos, Bongshin Lee, Tanja Blascheck, Petra Isenberg. Visualizing Information on Watch Faces: A Survey with Smartwatch Users. IEEE VIS 2020 - Visualization Conference Short Papers, Oct 2020, Los Alamitos, CA, United States. ⟨10.1109/VIS47514.2020.00038⟩. ⟨hal-03005319v2⟩