Yahoo's Weather, Fantasy, and News apps are some of the most popular on iPhone, so of course the company is hoping they'll become fixtures on Apple Watch as well. But shrinking a phone screen's worth of information, graphics, and interaction down to fit on a watch face wasn't exactly easy, and Yahoo's team worked for months to figure out how best to reimagine their apps for the Apple Watch. BuzzFeed News talked to some of the designers about how they did it:
Weather
"We designed Weather to include a couple different ideas," Adam Cahan, Yahoo's Senior Vice President of Mobile and Emerging Products, told BuzzFeed News. "Current conditions, forecasts, what it feels like, presented in a visually compelling way."
The weather app is meant to work with the Watch's Glances function, which provides user with quick hits of information. But, according to Yahoo, people check their weather app twice a day: when they wake up, and when they go to sleep. So Yahoo designed the new Weather app with that in mind, with two in-depth forecasts to let users know what the weather is going to be like, and what clothes they should be thinking about for tomorrow.
Fantasy
Yahoo's Fantasy users are rabid, and the company is hoping to capitalize on the fanbase's need for up-to-the-minute data driving them to purchase an Apple Watch. "We wanted to create a data-rich environment instead of just downsizing the iPhone app," said William Lu, a Yahoo developer. To do that, Yahoo developed single-look graphs to give users a quick way to gauge how their team is performing.
Taking advantage of the Watch's dictation abilities, Yahoo also built "Smack Talk" functionality into the app.
News Digest
While most news organizations will use the Watch to focus on notifications, Yahoo's News Digest will avoid sending out a push notification except in rare circumstances. Instead, the app will show you the most important news story of the day at the top of every hour. "We want it to become habit-forming, addictive in that you begin to rely on it," said Nick D'Aloisio, Product Manager for the News Digest. Instead of buzzing the news to you, it wants you to interact with the news.
Once you check the news you can swipe through for more information past the headline screen. With one swipe you can access a longer summary, written by an editorial member to maximize the amount of words that fit on the screen.
Swipe again, and another screen will show what Yahoo calls an "atom" — a statistic, quotation, stock ticker, map, or image. The News Digest team will decide what kind of information will provide the most context, and give it its own screen.
Finally, if you want to read more, there will be a speed reading option. "We didn't want vertical scrolling on the Watch, it's too small to keep your thumb on the screen," said D'Aloisio. Instead, the News Digest will show one word at a time on screen, playing through the entire article in a way that is, in theory, better suited for the tiny screen on your wrist.