A survey of patterns for adapting smartphone app UIs to smart watches

Wearable devices, such as smart watches and fitness trackers are growing in popularity, creating a need for application developers to adapt or extend a UI, typically from a smartphone, onto these devices. Wearables generally have a smaller form factor than a phone; thus, porting an app to the watch necessarily involves reworking the UI. An open problem is identifying best practices for adapting UIs to wearable devices. This paper contributes a study and data set of the state of practice in UI adaptation for wearables. We automatically extract UI designs from a set of 101 popular Android apps that have both a phone and watch version, and manually label how each UI element, as well as how screens in the app, are translated from the phone to the wearable. The paper identifies trends in adaptation strategies and presents design guidelines. We expect that the UI adaptation strategies identified in this paper can have wide-ranging impacts for future research and identifying best practices in this space, such as grounding future user studies that evaluate which strategies improve user satisfaction or automatically adapting UIs.