Visual bugs with watch faces

[Tom301]

So all the watch faces that display the time as HH:MM display the hours with a leading zero.

Meaning that e.g. if it's 3:15, it's displayed as 03:15.

The leading 0 is annoying me and seems like a bug. No other thing displays times like that. My old Fitbit doesn't, my computers don't, even the LCD clocks on my microwave, thermostats, etc. don't display the hours with a leading 0. It's annoying.

Second bug is that the month is displayed in all-caps whereas the day is displayed mixed-case. So today, the date is being displayed on my Fitbit as "Mon, OCT 16."

Why not "Mon, Oct 16" (since mixed-case is easier to read), or at the very least, "MON, OCT 16". Having different capitalization conventions looks stupid.

I'm frankly surprised that the product shipped like this. The software products that I work on would not have shipped with these issues. It doesn't inspire a ton of confidence in the rest of the product.

[Guy_]

Hi @Tom301 - it is probably convention in 24 hr mode to display leading 0, try switching to 12hr mode.

This may change date display.

[Tom301]

Everything I own is set to 12-hour mode, including the Fitbit.

[UlrikeDG]

Users were incredibly frustrated with the clock options for the Charge 5. Maybe they'll release a new one for the Charge 6 that works better for you, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

[Triletics]

@Tom301 These are not bugs but design decisions. It's a matter of personal preferences whether users like it or not but don't label it as bugs because it's misleading. I do agree the choice of clock faces is very poor and some (like Hawaiian Punch) are designed to confuse people. Some faces are kind of laggy to appear (like the default one when each element appears in sequence so it takes about a second to actually see the time but this seems to be another design decision as most faces appear instantly). There is not a single watch face filled with more data. It's always one data field at a time (so need to tap through stats) and in each case, a data field takes very little space while the time steals the whole screen area. I guess Fitbit hires UI designers with an eagle eye because I can hardly see those tiny labels (and my eyes aren't the worst) 🙂  Yet, I like the option to magnify (3 taps) the screen and pan onto the element. Particularly useful when I want to see battery status (swipe up from the main screen) which is too tiny and it's dark grey on black (what were they thinking?). Nevertheless, these are all design decisions not bugs 🤷

[Tom301]

No, sorry, I challenge you to find a graphic designer who would intentionally display the day and month in the same string using different capitalization conventions, or a graphic designer who thinks it looks better to display HH:MM times with a leading zero. There isn't one. These are visual bugs. (Note the distinction between visual bugs, i.e., things that aren't the way that the designer intended, as opposed to "regular" software bugs, i.e., ones where the software malfunctions.)

Note that almost all the watch faces display the time as HH above MM. In that case, it's graphically necessary for the hours to have a leading zero to balance out the grid of digits. I will bet you a million dollars that whoever made the HH:MM watch faces simply took a different watch face and repositioned the hours and minutes to be on the same line and did nothing to remove the leading 0 in the hours. It's programming laziness, not a design decision.

Likewise, most of the watch faces only display the month, not the day of the week. I'm sure it was a design decision to display the month in all-caps. So somebody had to write the code to display it in all-caps. Fine. But for the few watch faces that also display the day of the week, nobody went to the same trouble of capitalizing that. Again, this is another fairly obvious example of programming laziness rather than a design decision.

I'm sure that whoever programmed these watch faces (the ones that display HH:MM and include the day of the week) simply took one of the other watch faces, repositioned the elements, and took an early lunch. This isn't what any graphic designer intended.