Pebble smart watch

Pebble smart watch first time user experience

This experience involved a few touchpoints: the watch itself (packaging + onscreen cues), the mobile website, and the iPhone app.

The good bits:

  • First of all, no account was required and no introductory walkthrough. I was taken right into the process of setting up my device. Note: Unfortunately, they now force login in the latest version of the iOS app!
  • The hardware packaging was very intuitive and light on manuals. Instead, I was urged to visit go.getpebble.com to set up my device
  • The mobile website linearly revealed the steps I needed to take as I scrolled.
  • The instructions that appeared on the Pebble’s screen, although truncated versions of what I was seeing on the mobile website or iOS app, were very complementary and timely. 
  • Bluetooth pairing was painless, and I appreciated that I was shown an additional iOS prompt to download the Pebble app after I’d successfully paired the two devices.
  • There was a push notification when the pebble was successfully updated and paired with the iOS app after download, and this push notification dropped me directly into the status area of the iOS app so that I could take next step by setting up notifications.

To be improved:

  • There is a lot of instructions for setup (you can see in the screens above that there are two 7+ image how-to slides that you have to swipe through). Unfortunately, putting the instructions on slides like this makes it very difficult to remember where to find a specific step in the instructions, which is important if a user runs into an error on any of these steps. I might recommend listing these out as regular elements of a page, so they can be anchor-linked to from help documentation.