Are you a smartwatch "power user"?

What do you use your smartwatch for?

A few weeks ago, I overheard a conversation between someone on the Pixel Watch team and a woman I know. He was quizzing her at a party about her Pixel watch and what features she used. He'd ignored me when I said I had a non-Google watch. She thought for a moment and said, other than telling the time, all she used were pretty much the step counter and contactless payments. He looked a bit crestfallen at his impromptu user-research participant and somewhat dismissively sneered, "Well, you're not exactly a power user, are you?"

I'm trying to imagine what being a "power user" of a watch is like. Can anyone enlighten me?

I think smart-watches are much like Alexa. What the user wants to do with it is almost totally at odds with what the company is selling. Alexæ are mostly kitchen timers, song players, and light switches. No one is a "power user" constantly installing skills and using it for anything which increases the product team's engagement metrics.

The same is probably true of watches. Alerts are nifty - but cumbersome for replies. The health stuff is useful - but only for a subset of users. Seeing the time is great - but if the battery lasts less than a week, who wants to keep that screen on?

People use watches because they are moderately more convenient to carry than the giant phones we have nowadays.

Back when mobile phones were new, exciting, and made a feature of being tiny, I was working for a network operator and trying to come up with reasons for people to use our brand-new 3G network. All the research we had showed that people used their phones for exactly three things:

1. Voice calls
2. Text messages
3. A third thing

That "3rd thing" was varied. For some it was playing snake, for others it was a calendar, and a few took photos. But almost no-one used their phone beyond the basics. They weren't investigating the sub-menus, nor were they using most of their device's capability unless it was heavily advertised to them (ringtones, basically).

It took the industry a huge amount of effort to get people to actually use their phones for more than calls and texts. Part of that was bigger screens with enticing icons (although users will always be reluctant to click mysterious icons). Another part was that phones became genuinely useful. But perhaps the biggest change, I think, is that phones became easy to use.

Watches have tiny screens. You can only get a few words of a message on there. Icons are tiny and hard to reliably tap. Swiping away at your wrist or fiddling with a crown is a faff. Talking into your wrist makes you look like a prat. Interacting with a smartwatch is annoying. Why would anyone want to spend more time using it than is strictly necessary?

I'm sure there are some people out there browsing the web on their wrist, and sending endless voice-notes to their AI assistant, and setting up complex travel plans by tapping their nose on the screen, and installing new watch faces which always point to the nearest Dignitas clinic, and seeing what their heart-rate did during that last run, and tracking whether their menstrual cycle is synced to the phases of the moon, and hoping that tripping on the stairs didn't send an alert to the emergency services, and whatever else the team has cooked up to show that they're still innovating.

But I'll bet those "power users" are vastly outnumbered by people who are using a smartwatch for the limited set of actions which are useful to them; not to the manufacturer.

Perhaps the real power users have is the power to use a device on their own terms?