I have the original 42mm Apple Watch Sport in space gray. I wear it every day except Shabbat and absolutely love it. I get tons of questions about whether I like it and how I use it from people who see me wearing it. I also read a fair amount of skepticism about Apple Watch, particularly in the developer world, so I want to describe my usage of it and make a case for why it’s a uniquely powerful new form of computer for enhancing daily life.

I was a believer in Apple Watch from the get-go, but as many other users have written, the full potential was unlocked for me by watchOS 3. The ability to swipe to change watch faces and manage faces from the Watch app on the iPhone was the game-changing feature for me. That change was complemented by the new Dock of saved apps, and both were beefed up by OS-level changes that keep apps alive for quicker launching if they’re in the Dock or in complications on a saved watch face.

The latter two changes made it… well, possible to use apps on the Watch Series 0, as the original model is colloquially called. (Since the Series 1 and 2 devices are much faster, they overcame the painfully slow launching of apps in more direct ways.) But easy navigation between watch faces is the feature that most supports how I mainly use the watch: as a tightly focused assistant that supports my current activity.

After months of use, I’ve landed on a few contexts that seem to cover the range of things I need from Apple Watch, and I have a watch face for each one. For now, I just change faces by swiping across when I switch contexts, but it’s easy to imagine a future watchOS update that switches faces automatically based on intelligently determined contexts like location, time of day or week, appointments, even who’s there with you.

What really opened up Apple Watch for me was an insight about how the new input method, the Digital Crown, changes the concept of priority when organizing one’s device. Before going into how my watch is set up, it’s worth describing this new paradigm, so it’s clear how I take advantage of it in daily use.

The Digital Crown and Its Effect on List Order

On a device with a lot of vertical screen space — basically anything bigger than a watch — we can use visual hierarchy to organize our information. We see all the relevant inputs at once, and we can use spatial awareness to navigate them and choose the right ones.

In today’s desktop and mobile environments, there are two basic strategies for how to organize things, whether it’s text, photos, app icons, recipes or whatever else: lists (one-dimensional) and grids (two-dimensional). It’s not hard to imagine the jump to organizing information in three-dimensional visual space, either, as though your stuff is arrayed on a desk in front of you or on the walls around you or floating in the air. That’s what the cool kids call augmented reality and virtual reality, and we’re getting there quickly.

On a watch, information that can be displayed on screen has an overriding constraint: The screen is too tiny for you to see more than one thing at a time. Apple organized the various areas of watchOS 3 into lists and grids, too — Apple Watch does have a 2D screen just like other devices — but each item in a list or grid has much more riding on it, because when the user selects it, it’s going to become the only thing they can see on their screen.

A watch face is about the biggest useful grid you can fit onto this device. Apple has set the limit of how many things you can currently fit on the grid at six, that limit being the five complications available on the Modular face, plus the time. (You might notice below that I use the Modular face almost exclusively.) I find five complications to be a comfortable limit to the amount of information — comprised of displayed info and available actions — that I need in any one context. To expand the limit to other contexts, watchOS 3 allows multiple watch faces: a list of grids. But with the tiny screen that only lets you see one list item at a time, how do you navigate the list?

The Digital Crown merges the familiar computer UI behavior of scrolling with the familiar watch UI behavior of turning a dial. It’s much less precise than the pixel-perfect scrolling you can do on a trackpad or touchscreen, though. (Yes, you can scroll on screen with the watch, too, but there’s so little space to move that it’s a bit silly). At first, the loss of scrolling precision on the watch drove me crazy, but then I realized that the trade-off gained me something, too.

Because the nature of a watch makes changing what’s on screen a rare but important event — and because the screen is so small — the choices of what to put on screen need to be constrained to as few options as possible and prioritized severely. Things you don’t do often need to be kept out of the way, and things you never do need to be hidden entirely. Then, with a tiny control like the Digital Crown, you have to put your high-priority options in places that are dead-easy to reach.

Fortunately — and I think this is the key innovation of the Digital Crown — you get four high-priority spots in a list: the immediately next and previous spots, and the first and last spot. Scrolling to intermediate items in a list with the crown is a bit tricky, but scrolling just enough to move once is easy, and cranking the crown as far as it goes either way is nearly as easy.

That means your list has two directions; the starting point — wherever you currently are in the list — should be considered the middle, you have two high-priority spots on either side, and two more beyond those at the ends of the list. That means, for sanity’s sake, the things on each side of the list should be related to each other somehow, so you can further understand the list by remembering what each side is generally for.

So that’s what I’ve done with my list of watch faces, as well as my apps in the Dock, and I’ve done what I can to organize the Home screen of apps this way as well.

(Now that I’ve laid out my beautiful theory, I should probably mention that the Digital Crown doesn’t actually do anything in the watch face management screen, which is dumb. For selecting watch faces, you have to actually paw through it like an animal whether you’re on the live face or in the list. Hopefully Apple will change that and allow scrolling through the list of faces with the crown. In the meantime, I still organize my faces this way, so I only have to remember to think one way when using Apple Watch.)

Faces

Thanks to all that stuff I just explained, it’s not possible to order my watch faces in a simple two-dimensional list. So I’ll just go through them from left to right, but here’s how they’re all arranged in the iPhone app, and you can imagine the Main face being the “middle,” in the sense that it’s where I’m starting from most of the time: