Apple Watch - Trying to improve the Control Center UI in 15 minutes



Apple Watch Control Center - current design

If there’s one thing I really don’t like about the UI of the Apple Watch, it’s the Control Center. 
Unlike most of the Watch user interface, the Control Center looks unpolished: the buttons are too big, there’s too little whitespace, and the status icons on the top seem out of place. 
I decided to try my luck and improve the UI a bit. 

Knowing how long simple design tasks might take - I decided to challenge myself: 
1. Only simple changes (no redesign) 
2. Limit my time to 15 minutes max.


Related: This is why 3D Touch failed.

The issues: 

1. Status icons seem misplaced and feel a bit unrelated to the rest of the design. 
2. The phone icon looks much bigger than the location service icon because it’s a long icon. 
3. Toggles are too close to each other - there aren’t enough whitespaces.

Apple Watch Control Center - current design issues

The changes: 

As my goal was to finish the changes within 15 minutes.
I took some screenshots and used PowerPoint to modify some of the elements (without having to draw anything from scratch).
This is a very simple technique and I use whenever I need to modify some existing designs or add simple additions that do not require Photoshop.

Related: A list of all the operating systems running on smartwatches.


Here’s what I did: 
1. I changed the status icons to be all white (when active). 
2. Cropped the iPhone icon (I’m not 100% sure about this change but didn’t have time to think of anything better) 
3. Moved the phone icon next to the location services icon to create a “status area"
4. Made the toggle buttons slightly smaller and increased the distances between them
Of course, if I had more time, I might have changed the look and feel of the toggles to look similar to iPhone’s rounded toggle buttons. 

Here’s the result:

Apple Watch Control Center - existing vs. fine tuned version
Thoughts? Better? Worse?


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