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This. Totally. I would say I'm quite a power user usually. I very carefully explored every feature my apple watch has and tried to incorporate as many of them as I could. Very, very few features stuck because they were genuinely helpful. Almost everything being pushed is a gimmick or a feature bullet point from some product manager. The actual good stuff: Time Workouts Payments The occasionally useful stuff: Notifications Noise DB levels to see if I need to put on ear protection Workoutdoors app for on-device maps and path breadcrumbs The once in a blue moon stuff: Music controls and on device playlists On device audiobooks Weather complication Voice memos Alarm Shortcut to call my husband The feature I tried to get working but gave up on: Tap to talk to ChatGPT and get a 100 word or less reply

Maybe it’s niche, but if you do endurance sports like triathlon, you can easily become a power user. I think I did. You constantly look at your watch during workouts. It does navigation on trails, it measures your heart rate, tracks workouts, keeps pace during races. The metrics it gathers about hrv, sleep, rest hr etc are vital to adjusting the routine. It acts as a data recorder for multiple sensors: hr strap does a million running metrics, a separate strap does hydration, on a bike there’s a power meter. It supports my routine alerting me about the fast, timing my morning porrige (14 min). It’s my payment method on long rides when I need water and could play audio if I wanted to. I care about advanced features like multi-band gps and handover with my bike computer. It’s a vital tool, I need it for so many things. But vast majority of smartwatches do not cater for this crowd at all. Even the Apple Ultra feels like a toy. Garmin upper end stuff is where it is.

> What the user wants to do with it is almost totally at odds with what the company is selling. Alexii are mostly kitchen timers, song players, and light switches. No one is a "power user" constantly installing skills and using it for anything which increases the product team's engagement metrics. There is IMO a design flaw that tanked adoption of not just Alexa, but also on-phone voice assistants. People would want to use reliable equivalent of "computer, play music" or any kind of "computer, do X". But what is on offer by all major companies is, "${brand name}, do X on ${brand name} with ${brand name}". No thanks. More broadly, I think this is rarely noted explicitly - user interfaces are ultimate marketing platforms, because you get to inject your marketing literally between the user and the task they're doing. Whether purposefully or intuitively, companies understand that, and the UX goes to shit as they design the product to also be a marketing platform.

Listening to power users is the product management equivalent of armoring the places on the fighter plane where you find bullet holes. You should of course be looking for where the planes that didn't come back have damage. Smart watches become shelfware pretty easily. Especially when you don't have the Apple Watch cachet.

The killer feature of modern watches is the vibration alarm - you can wake up even if you use earplugs/headphones/noise machine and you won't wake up anyone else along with you. Health stuff like sleep tracking is likely useful for the vast majority of population, at least to everyone who needs time and thus lives on a schedule of some sort, without the possibility to fall asleep and wake up whenever one feels like it. I too don't see how the ability to run apps is of any value so I use "sports" watch instead of a "smart" watch, which gives me better screen and better battery life in exchange of a smaller number of apps I won't ever run. Though the battery life is not an issue and smartwatch users I know charge their watch while in the shower.