Wearables have quickly become an easy way to enhance health, personal care, and fitness routines and deliver notifications from paired mobile devices. In 2019, the number of wearable shipments jumped over 80% with a new high of 118.9 million units. By 2024, that number is expected to reach 526.8 million.
Consumers rely on wearables like smartwatches, wireless earbuds, and connected fitness products to enhance a wide range of daily activities, from measuring vitals for both proactive and reactive health care to improving their overall quality of life. That’s why accurate readings, comfortable fit, and an intuitive UI are so crucial to success.
If you’re a wearables maker, here are the success checkpoints on the way to ensuring your device is both functional and delightful — and how Centercode gets you there.
Great Fit
Wearables should be just that: wearable, i.e., ergonomic and comfortable for your customers. Without long-lasting comfort during a range of daily activities, your product may end up abandoned on a dresser — or worse, in a box on its way to a return pile.
Industry Challenges
- Achieving an ergonomic fit for all levels of activity
- Achieving a comfortable fit for long periods of wear
Your Path to Success
To guarantee your product is a great fit literally and figuratively, it’s essential to validate its design outside of the lab. Getting that real-world validation and final polish starts with testing — before launch and with every subsequent release.
Centercode’s strategies for airtight target market recruitment, comprehensive survey-building, and consistent engagement ensure the pre-release feedback on your wearable is both accurate and actionable. Our proven methods let you take the diversity of your target market into account so you can track wearability for every segment of your audience.
Interoperability
Every connected product maker knows how critical interoperability is to a frictionless experience. Today’s wearables are expected to work not only with consumers’ various phones but to communicate instantly with an enormous number of other connected devices, like tablets, thermostats, speakers, security systems, fitness equipment, and more.
Industry Challenges
- Making devices compatible with the smartphones customers use
- Ensuring it plays nicely with the existing devices in customers’ homes
- Ensuring it will play nicely with the tech customers will adopt in the future
Your Path to Success
Constant testing and iteration is the only way to ensure interoperability. But there is a truly staggering number of connected devices in the world. Deloitte reported that U.S. households owned an average of 11 connected devices in 2019. Testing the breadth and uniqueness today’s tech ecosystems is beyond the scope of even the best-resourced QA labs.
The Centercode Platform is built on a foundation of Delta Testing — meaning it’s built specifically to feed your agile release schedule with consistent, targeted customer feedback. Combined with test platforms, which expand your QA lab with technographics insights from your testers’ home environments, you’ll get a firsthand look at how your wearable interacts with the myriad operating systems, networks, and connected devices used in the wild. Centercode not only ensures timely releases with increased quality, it enables you to keep up with ever-evolving technology environments to drive greater customer satisfaction.
Real-World Performance
Simplicity is complicated. The clean and straightforward interface your customers interact with hides an incredibly sophisticated device that needs to function seamlessly in thousands of everyday scenarios: when it’s raining or when it’s hot; whether hiking, walking the dog, riding in a car, on a stationary cycle or biking through the city; whether your customers are athletes or couch potatoes. In every situation, they expect your product to work reliably and without a second thought.
Industry Challenges
- Ensuring seamless functionality in the real world
- Providing a straightforward and easy to use interface
- Ensuring perfect performance in all weather conditions and temperatures
- Guaranteeing accurate readings for all body types and skin shades
- Guaranteeing accurate readings for different types and levels of activity
Your Path to Success
Delivering a wearable that meets and exceeds expectations requires an enormous amount of testing diversity — not only in the behaviors and preferences of your testers themselves but across a wide range of real-world environments, weather conditions, and types of activities.
Centercode connects wearable makers with their geographically and demographically diverse audiences through Betabound, our network of 250,000+ testers. These enthusiastic, pre-profiled testers ensure you’re getting relevant feedback from even the most niche segments of your target audience. This means you’ll have the feedback to deliver a seamless experience — no matter where and how your customers wear your device.
Let’s Connect
Learn more about Centercode’s unique solutions for tackling the challenges of wearables, and get a more in-depth understanding of our comprehensive service offerings in Making Good Technology Great.
