I’ve been pretty neutral about the changes on watchOS 10. I understood that people don’t like changes -
but it’s been 2 months now and I still try to bring up the control center the old way, I still try to access my most recently used apps the old way and I’m still annoyed by having submenus everywhere where watchOS 9 was straightforward with everything. watchOS 10 is the most unintuitive Apple experience I ever had.
Old top menu bar, one line leaving space for the actual content
New top menu bar with huge buttons at the top, pushing down the actual content
Probably the worst part on my 40mm SE is that the colorful backgrounds made all app icons on watch faces smaller (there has recently been a post about this) and I keep missing icons when clicking them. I sometimes need to click an icon 4 times until it registers, along with the colorful backgrounds and unnecessarily huge flashy other buttons this feels like a $50 knockoff Watch to me now.
Also what did they think when changing the menu bar at the top? It used to be one small line (picture 1) but now on my 40mm Watch about 1 fourth of the screen is covered by each app’s title or clock (picture 2). I know what app I’m in, I don’t need half the screen (exaggerating yes) covered to be reminded of the app I’m using.
watchOS 10 must’ve been designed by someone who doesn’t really use their Apple Watch much I assume. I’m not blaming them, everyone can make mistakes when the goal was progress but it’s not like a mistake has to be set in stone. Just roll it back or give us a choice between design and functionality - I personally prefer functionality, it’s not like watchOS 9 was so ugly that it needed a re-design to begin with.
I find the “Smart” Stack anything but. After sucking my battery dry with the weather widget (took me a week from the RC to stumble on that) to absolute agony trying to change any features because maybe my fingers are too big. I went back to my usual faces with complications that displayed the information I needed in less than a second.
Sadly, that left me either the problem of wasting my time to simply swipe left or right to go from a pretty analog watch face to Infograph with my nice 8 complications, glance at it, and swipe back to my pretty analog face. Total time in under 2 seconds, making it simple, intuitive, and helpful. But nope, press for 2 seconds, looks through the little watch face icons, select it, read it for a second, then spend 2 seconds holding that face to go back into edit mode to select the other face. If people were having too much trouble with accidental swipes from clothing (I mostly wear dress shirts, yet only happened maybe 2 or 3 times in two years of daily wear, add a no swipe toggle in control panel, and no more accidental swipes. That group is happy, and I’m happy having my swipe function to use as I see fit (my needs and moods change throughout the day, so no, focus modes won’t help).
The list goes on and on of unintuitive changes made for the sake of change, not improvement in actual use. To take a functional and intuitive UX and fiddle with it quite literally just for the sake of it shows design teams struggling to find helpful new features, so just move things around and make it feel different. That goal they met.
The only real attempt at improving utility and speed of feature management was double tap. Rebranded from accessibility features, and not exactly enough of a breakthrough to make me rush to the counter to trade in my S7 for an S9, and hope one out of three double pinches achieves the command I meant to enter, instead of a single nose tap.
I didn’t put the watch face swipe in my post because I think some people simply accidentally swiped all the time but your suggestion making it an option sounds perfect
The odd thing is that the UX was far from perfect even before 10. There were plenty of things that could have been done. The home screen in particular, which has barely been messed with. No ability to set favorites in list view to sit at the top for easy access is a ridiculous oversight. You can’t hide apps you don’t want on your home screen, or sort them in any way, let alone organize them into folders. The best you can do is remove the app altogether. The app cluster view is really cluttered and hard to distinguish what you are looking for. To me that seems like it should be a far higher priority than redoing perfectly usable bits of UI.