Wearable tech is one of the biggest trends of the past few years. While the Apple Watch didn’t revolutionize mobile technology in the way that they had hoped, other forms of wearable tech have taken off. Exercise aids are one of the biggest ones in the market at the moment with wristbands and trainers that can link to your phone and give you all sorts of useful information to help you workout. If you’re looking for your next business venture, developing wearable tech might be the answer. Here are a few tips to help you get started.
Size Matters
When you’re trying to design a piece of wearable tech, the size is one of the things that can make or break your product. People aren’t going to wear a huge clunky thing on their wrist all of the time. You need to get everything into it in the smallest amount of space possible. The design also needs to be fairly unimposing so when people wear it, they don’t feel like they’re making a drastic fashion choice. Black or white is always a good color choice because it’s nondescript and it will go with whatever clothes people are wearing. A neon green bracelet is going to look stupid worn alongside a nice black suit. However, don’t go too far the other way and prioritize small size over functionality. If you start taking things out to make the size smaller, you’ll end up with a sleek piece of wearable tech that doesn’t really do much at all.
Do People Actually Need It?
One of the reasons that Apple Watches haven’t taken off as much as people thought is that they aren’t really that useful. They basically just ended up being a watch that you can also read your messages on. Saving you the hassle of taking your phone out of your pocket was about all they did, and you couldn’t easily reply so you needed to take it out anyway. In short, people didn’t feel like they actually needed one. Whereas exercise aids are great for tracking progress and finding ways to improve your workout which is actually valuable.
Don’t Neglect The App
Another common mistake with wearable tech is putting all of your efforts into the item itself and neglecting the app that goes along with it. Look at the average cost to develop an app and make sure you put enough of your budget aside to do it properly. If your app doesn’t have a slick user interface then customers are going to get fed up of using it regardless of how good the tech itself is. Don’t over complicate it too much otherwise it won’t be simple to operate and people won’t bother with it. Stick to the basic functions that you need and execute them well. That will be much better than having hundreds of useless features that clog up your app.
Test It Properly
Once you’ve got your idea and built a prototype, test it thoroughly. Unlike a standalone app, you’ll need to test it using its proposed function, for example, if you are developing an exercise wearable, you need to go running with it on. Just testing the app won’t be enough to check that it actually works.