Android Wear Design Story
Article Summary
Roman Nurik and Timothy Jordan from Google's Android team designed their first Android Wear app and discovered something surprising: adapting square UIs to round screens took under an hour.
Two Android design advocates at Google challenged themselves to design a contextual walking tour app for the then-new Android Wear platform. They documented their entire process, from initial concept to seeing their designs running on LG G Watch and Moto 360 prototypes, revealing what makes wearable design fundamentally different.
Key Takeaways
- Designed for 140x140 dp screens: only 2-3 pieces of info at a time
- Round adaptation took under 1 hour for all 8 screens
- Context-aware notifications beat traditional app launcher icons on wearables
- Used Android Design Preview tool to mirror mocks directly to prototype devices
Designing for wearables requires ruthless prioritization of information, but the actual pixel-pushing becomes far easier when you're forced to show only what matters most.
About This Article
Roman Nurik and Timothy Jordan wanted to figure out if designing for wearables was actually different from what they'd done before with touch UIs and Glass. They had 140x140 dp of screen space to work with, which was a real constraint.
They started with Taylor Ling's Android Wear 0.1 design template and used Nurik's Android Design Preview tool to send mockups directly to LG G Watch and Moto 360 devices. This let them iterate and get feedback in real time.
When they adapted the 8 square screen designs to round devices, the changes were minimal. They scaled backgrounds to 160x160 dp, adjusted margins from 12dp to 26dp, and repositioned circular actions. The whole round optimization took less than an hour.