I get this weekly progress report from Fitbit. I has changed little from a few years ago, when it made me so angry I stopped using Fitbit products and dropped my yearly subscription.
I recently bought a Fitbit that I can wear as a clip-on pedometer and it came with a free Fitbit subscription. But I am so angry at the weekly progress reports that I am not going to pay for the subscription.
Here is the problem:
I get seven circles, each of which is normed to the day which had the most steps. That day is portrayed as a star. The other six days show a portion of the circle colored indicating what fraction of the total day's steps that day was.
First off, this would be easier to read as a histogram. Second, it is normalized differently for each week, so I cannot tell what progress I have made. Third, it is subject to the problem that an abnormally high day screws the whole display off. This last week I went walking all over creation because I walked to my exercise gym, walked all over the grocery store, and ran a ton of other errands, finally eating out for dinner. That single day was completely abnormal making the whole display invalid.
OK - I get some averages: steps per day, a calorie estimate. I get some totals: miles walked. And comparisons to last week only. No trend lines, no ability to see 4 week, 3 moths, 1 year or anything else. AND NO GRAPHS OR HISTOGRAMS.
I hate getting angry every week when I see the same **ahem** Fitbit email. I put up with that s..t for a couple of years when they first sent out those **ahem** circle diagrams way back when. Every attempt I made to reason with the Fitbit User Interface people was a black hole. Nobody responded or said anything. Finally, they said something to the effect of "post your frustrations to the message board." Yeah,as if that would make a difference. I'm a coder. I have worked for decades in software, including Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Data Science, and even eight years in a Human Factors department. I am not especially interested in venting my frustrations like I am doing now to all and sundry fellow customers who have no power to change things. I have no expectation that anything I say here will be read or paid attention to by the people who created that miserable excuse for a weekly progress report years ago and have not done a single thing to improve it in the years since it was rolled out.since (my email shows) December 12, 2016. At least before then I was presented with a set of numbers that were easy to read.
Why the hell can't the User Interface people set up a library of different data presentation possibilities and let the user decide what to have in the weekly progress report. Oh, silly me. The user's home dashboard doesn't even have that capability. I have tried to pull up a series of different graphs, but I can only get a single graph which I have a drop-down to select (steps, heart rate, distance, etc), instead of having all of them at once. Oh - and I can only get three choices for data: daily, 7 days, 28 days. There needs to be two choices, bucko: number of days to display (day, week, 2wk, 4wk, 3mo, 6mo, yr, till start) and the summation (hourly average, daily average, weekly average, monthly average).
By the way, you could add a lot of neat AI in here: trend lines, predictive values based on past data, suggestions for improvement based on data, curve fitting, etc. etc.
But you really, really have to fix your dashboard before you even start to think about fixing your weekly progress report.
And I don't want to be angry anymore. I am dropping the Fitbit subscription as soon as it stops being free and I start to pay for it. Right now, the most important piece of data analysis is MyFitnessPal weight chart. I am going to stick with that.
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