What Apple Watch design alternatives do you wish had made it into the final product? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Anna-Katrina Shedletsky, CEO at Instrumental, former Apple Watch Product Design Lead, on Quora:
It was incredibly exciting to work on a product that had never been built before, at a company with seemingly endless resources to “do it right”.
One of the biggest challenges of building a first generation product is to figure out what features should be in the product and what features should not. Just because something is possible to build, doesn’t mean it would make a good product!
This process was interesting because it was a collaborative effort between the Industrial Design (ID) team, marketing (though I never personally interacted with those folks), and the engineering team. As a member of the engineering team, we were working hard to understand the extent of what was technologically possible within the constraints we’d been given, or any tradeoffs to those constraints. It was a very complex, multi-dimensional problem!
I was excited about the potential of various health sensors and we looked at a lot of them! While the photoplethysmograph (PPG) made it in the first generation, we also looked at electrocardiograph (ECG). There were many complicating factors: the water-sealing requirement was a big one (ECG would require isolated electrodes which means seams which could leak water), the design of the sensor and making sure the data produced would be useful, etc. It turned out to be too much of a challenge to cram it into the first generation with all of the other high-risk features (literally everything in the Apple Watch Series 1 was new in one way or another).
One of the important skills in engineering and designing a new product is making tough decisions about how to weigh the risk of a feature with its potential value add and to make the call as to whether it should be in the first generation, or a later version (after some of the other risks have been figured out). ECG is a good example of Apple showing restraint: just because it was potentially possible, doesn’t mean it should be in the product. The team figured ECG out on later generations of the product and it’s helping a ton of people manage their health better – so congratulations to them!
I also wish we had been able to make the cellular antenna work in the first generation product – we couldn’t figure it out because the antenna design was already incredibly challenging and the chipset for cellular at the time would have taken up 1/2 of all of the board space available (and we needed that space for other important stuff!).
Antenna Design was a challenge because the design was … not particularly antenna friendly: it’s a metal box strapped to an incredibly lossy surface (your wrist). Think back to the contemporary designs of the day: iPhones had splits in the enclosures to enable large portions of the metal enclosure itself to be an antenna. That didn’t work for Watch because it’s not possible to make a split between metal and non-metal (an insulator like plastic) that is also waterproof under pressure.
While Watch had many engineering challenges this one was fundamental: without at least a Wi-Fi antenna, we had no product. The brilliant leadership on the antenna team at the time worked closely with my Product Design (PD) team to come up with a solution. We tried a lot of things that were crazy, including a design where we would thread the antenna around the display and up into a deep groove cut into the coverglass itself (we didn't know how we would actually do this at the time). This got the antenna element above the horizon of the metal enclosure, and gave it enough separation from the metal traces on the display to kind of work – though it was less than 1mm away. It was an unhappy compromise: the antenna team was very concerned about whether it would give the performance the product needed and the PD team had only vague notions about how we would make the parts themselves. But we worked together and set off as a team to figure out how to:
- Make this groove in glass and Synthetic Sapphire (we were just starting to work with shaping sapphire, which is much harder than glass and so difficult to shape)
- Make the supply chain work so that the antenna could be assembled at the final assembly site. We knew that the antenna design would need to be iterated many times to get it to work, but the display supply chain is at least 12 weeks. If we assembled the physical antenna at the glass factory, it would take 12 weeks to get new antenna designs and the product would have never shipped. So we had to design a way to assemble it around an incredibly sensitive OLED that would break if you touched it. Ever heard of a game called Operation? It was like that.
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