Timex Family Connect

About the Project

Timex was diving into the smartwatch industry with their first product being Timex Family Connect. This project included a child smartwatch paired with a phone application. The devices allowed the users to track the watch wearers’ location. send voice and SMS messaging. have two-way calling conversations and more.

About the Team

The UX team was a two-person team with myself, as a UX Engineer, and a Senior UX/UI Engineer. My contributions to this project included the design of the application dashboard, messaging UI, to-do system, and assistance directing the promotional videos.

01. Discovery

The Problem

The biggest developmental hurdle we were facing was working with the current platform that Timex purchased and was looking to reskin and improve under the Timex name. The current state of the platform was functional, however, lacked usability, accessibility, and general clarity. Our task was to redesign the visual identity of both the watch and the mobile application but also tackle UX pain points that we identified in our discovery.

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UX Review

Our first task was to conduct a UX review of the current state of the app and analyze any touchpoints that we can improve. This UX review consisted of a hierarchical inspection, stakeholder interviews, user tests, and competitive analysis. While there were a large number of issues the UX team wanted to address, the top three areas of improvement were the dashboard, messaging, and clarity of system status.

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02. UX Review Details

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Dashboard

The Timex UX team identified the dashboard or home screen needed a redesign. In its current state, the home screen had two states, a condensed device dashboard with a map view, and a full dashboard with settings. Additionally, the app’s current state had confusing icons and did not efficiently use white space when on the map view. The goal of the redesign of the dashboard was to consolidate both states into one view and present the important information in the forefront but also highlight the child’s location.

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Messaging

In its initial state, the application did not highlight messages well. If the child sent a message to their parent, the only notification would be the default iOS or Android notification. There was no indication in the app that there was a message waiting for them. Additionally, the messaging UI needed improvement visually and functionally. Messaging was identified as the main use case for Timex Family Connect through user interviews and competitive analysis.

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Clarity of System Status

It was observed that there were multiple instances where the application was not identifying key information to the user. For instance, if the watch was dead or turned off, there was no way for the parent to know.

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03. Redesign

Initially, the visual identity of the original app was missing the Timex branding. For this reason, a lot of the design effort was the implementation of the Timex visual identity. Additionally, we went through and modernized the icons used on the homepage, the main profile page, the contact page, and the messaging UI.

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04. Iterations

After gaining a round of feedback from stakeholders and users, the number one complaint was the app did not look like an app for a child's watch. Our first designs followed Timex's usual style guide, however, we did not take into account that Timex's normal user group is not who this app is made for. To make the app more appealing to our target audience, we updated the visual identity.