Android Wear design principles

Designing a Wear application is different than designing a mobile or tablet application. The Wear operating system is very lightweight and has a specific set of jobs to accomplish by sharing the right information with the Wearer.

General Wear principles are Timely, Glanceable, Easy to Tap, Time-Saving.

Timely

Giving the right information at the right time.

Glanceable

Keeping the Wear application user interface clean and uncluttered.

Easy to Tap

The actions users will click on should have the right spacing and size of the picture.

Time-Saving

Creating the best application flows that do tasks quickly.

For any Wear application, we need the proper building blocks to control the business logic of the application and other architectural implementation. The following are the scenarios for developing a Wear application to help us to carve the wear application better:

• Defining layouts
• Creating lists
• Showing confirmations
• Wear navigation and actions
• Multifunction buttons

Defining layouts

Wearable applications can use the same layouts that we use in handheld Android device programming but with specific constraints for Wear applications. We should not do heavy processing actions similar to handheld Android devices in Wear applications and expect a good user experience.

An application designed for a round screen will not look great on square Wear devices. To resolve this, the Android Wear support library comes with the following two solutions:

• BoxInsetLayout
• Curved Layout

We can provide different resources to allow Android to detect the shape of the Android Wear at runtime.

Creating lists

Lists let the user select an item from a set of items. In the legacy Wear, 1.x API WearableListView helped programmers to build lists and custom lists. Wearable UI library now has WearableRecyclerView with curvedLayout support and has the best implementation experience in Wear devices.

We can add gestures and other magnificent functionalities: