In the span of less than a week after its US launch, Pokémon Go took the world by storm, broke App Store records, and became universally known as the first game succeeding at getting gamers off their couch and wandering into the real world in droves.

Beyond the excitement of seeing what is likely the beginning of a new era for mobile gaming, our team at Little Labs saw in Pokémon Go the perfect example of an experience that could benefit from a smartwatch component. The real-world/digital-world hybrid nature of the game indeed lends itself perfectly to wearables, which seamlessly bridge your digital life into reality by surfacing it directly on your wrist. This breaks the psychological barrier of having to pull your phone out of your pocket, unlock your device, and launch a specific app. Wearables and smartwatches surface these services directly into your physical life with zero friction; these two worlds are no longer separated.

Niantic and Nintendo were quick to realize this opportunity by creating a wearable dedicated to the Pokémon Go experience — the Pokemon Go Plus bracelet. Despite its clear limitations (no screen and only one single physical button) the first batch of Pokemon Go Plus wearables flew off the shelves and its international released delayed from July to September to ramp up production and meet the demand. But why buy a dedicated piece of hardware when the same could be achieved with a smartwatch and its most underrated feature: the watch face.

Watch faces: the 1st real digital dashboard

Watch faces are “micro-apps” running in the foreground of your smartwatch at all times. They have the unique property of being always accessible to the user with only the flick of a wrist, without requiring the user to unlock any screen or even launch an app. They are today’s most frictionless experience in our mobile world and the closest thing to having a constantly accessible digital dashboard without having to strap it to your face.

Little Labs is today’s leader in the watch face market with its Facer platform, allowing anybody to design, build, and distribute watch faces on all major smartwatches in a matter of minutes. With over 6k watch faces already created on the platform, you’d be hard pressed not to find something that fits your style or functionality requirements:

ChronoTach by Anthony Anthony Palileo

Light Bulb by SPARETIME

Zen Sushi by wutronic

Daily Grind by Garfield & Friends

Captain’s Log by Star Trek

While digital watch faces are, in their most “naive” format, mainly used today to give the user the time and a few other basic pieces of information like weather or battery status, they are becoming increasingly useful and interactive with the introduction of “complications” APIs, first by Apple, and shortly by Google as well with Android Wear 2.0.

Complications allow watch faces to surface additional information to the user at a glance, but also provide quick interactions with apps while your phone stays in your pocket. The data provided by these complications can either be provided by the watch face itself, or by 3rd party apps that it interfaces with — like Pokémon Go.

The Pokémon Go watch face concept

As we anxiously wait for the release of Android Wear 2.0 and its Complication API, our design team got to work on creating a concept for a Pokémon Go watch face that could leverage these features and enhance the game experience for smartwatch users. The result of our design experiment can be found below: