Brief: Smartwatches Need Glanceable Moments

With the spate of product announcements and second-generation offerings from Apple, LG, Microsoft, Samsung, and Timex, smartwatches and wearables have entered firms' agendas. However, to be successful, smartwatch apps will have to make a clean break from the past. Merely shrinking a website or mobile app to a teensy screen won't do it. Developing apps for smartwatches and wearables will require product managers to rethink the interaction experience, and application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals to rethink the delivery. To simplify the effort, developers should use customer journey maps to translate immediate, contextual, "glanceable" needs into intelligent notifications that people can quickly absorb and act on. They must also atomize their back-end APIs and implement prescriptive analytics to anticipate and deliver a customer's next most likely action.