Questions about the new website sleep page at fitbit.com/sleep

[MatthewFitbit]

5/25/17 Edit: 

Hi all, we wanted to let you know that you can now see a timestamp while hovering over the sleep graph on both our mobile apps and the website. Thanks for your patience while we worked to bring this to you.

4/13/17 Edit: 

Hi everyone, and thanks for your patience while our team reviewed your feedback. The following points of concern have been addressed:

• Multiple logins required when visiting the sleep page - this has been fixed
• Count of awake/restless - these stats now appear in the daily sleep record
• Total minutes awake/restless - this stat now appears in the daily sleep record

The recent changes to the website sleep page were intended to bring it into parity with the mobile app. With the above additions, you’ll now find identical information across these platforms:The one exception is a timestamp while hovering over the sleep graph, which appears in our mobile apps but not the website. Our team is committed to bringing this function to the website sleep page later this year, with the goal of maintaining a consistent interface across all platforms.

Many of you also requested a “sleep quality percentage” stat. Our team has heard this interest, and are always exploring new features and tools that can help our users on their path to improve their sleep, health and fitness.

Thanks again for engaging in constructive conversation around these changes. If you have additional ideas, those can be posted on our Feature Suggestions board. 

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4/4/17 Edit: I met with several teams today to make ensure that these concerns have been fully heard. At this point we've got some potential solutions under consideration, and I expect to hear back next week with something definitive to share with you.

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Hi everyone, and thanks for your feedback and suggestions regarding the new Sleep page. I've merged a few threads into this one and updated the subject line to reflect the general discussion. Here are some answers to a couple common questions in this thread:

• How do I view/edit sleep data for an individual day?
  
  • Got to https://www.fitbit.com/sleep and click on any of the individual days below the bar graph to see data for that day. You can adjust start and end sleep times on this page.
• Where is "Time to fall asleep"?
  
  • "Time to fall asleep"doesn't apply to trackers with automatic sleep detection (Flex and newer) - since you don't press a button to initiate sleep mode, there is no gap of time to measure between that action and the start of your sleep.
• Why doesn't the "Today" button do anything?
  
  • Our team is looking into this.
• Why do I have to login again when viewing the sleep page?
  
  • This bug has been resolved

I've read through every post here, and it sounds like the feedback and concerns can be summarized as the following:

• I want to see a "Sleep Efficiency" score
• I want to see the sum or times awake/restless
• I want to see time duration when mousing over the bar graph
• I want to see hour data when mousing over the sleep graph
• I want to manually log multiple sleep sessions per day

To clarify: If you have a Blaze, Charge 2, or Alta HR, you will see Sleep Stages data on this page. The above feedback is from other users who instead see a graph that looks like this:

sleep screen shot

Please let me know if there's something specific that is not on this list. Our team is definitely receptive to your feedback, and we will relay this info to them for consideration as they continue to refine and improve this page in the future.

I know that any change is going to be a little jarring, but please remember to keep your posts respectful and on-topic, per our Community Guidelines. This thread will be better for everyone as a constructive conversation.

[MatthewFitbit]

sleep screen shot

[MatthewFitbit]

@bluefoxicy The feature suggestion thread was just a mirror of this one, and didn't serve any additional purpose. It's much more effective to have a single focused conversation so that I can collect all the data in one place and make sure it gets heard. Please see my previous posts in this thread before you reach negative conclusions.

[delano]

The sleep percentage is very important to me and hope that it can be added back as soon as possible. And while the developers are at it it would be really great to have it on the mobile app as well. There seems to me that there is enough space on the mobile app to add it.

[orexxman]

I agree.  The new one-day-at-a-time sleep pattern display is not just inconvenient, but it is completely useless.  I purchased my FitBit  primarily to track my sleep apnea.  I want to see week(s) or month(s) at a time to see if/how I am progressing.

I want to go a step further and point out that there are similar problems with apps and software on systems developed by teams that are fresh out of college and/or unfamiliar with how the product is actually used.  For example, on my Tivo box, bugs and features appear, disappear, and sometimes reappear.  Clearly the same thing is happening here:  Changes are deployed without sufficient analysis, review, testing, and approval.

You must, absolutely, positively, include some senior software professionals that are experienced with regression testing, user testing, change control, and release based deployment.  Even if such a horrendous mistake got thru all the (currently missing reviews and testing), with a formal change tracking system, the error could have been backed-out as easily as clicking Undo in a word processing application (except this one 😛 ).  I am a long term IT professional, and I am astonished at how little some organizations know about real-world software development, testing and support.

Get your act together!!

[Phunster]

How is this helpful at all? (Recorded my sleep with my One)

How is this helpful or even informative??

[portia14]

Sleep Efficiency!!!!!!!

[bluefoxicy]

@MatthewFitbit Your list doesn't include the previously-available feature of toggling sleep tracker sensitivity mode for already-recorded sleep segments.

Also, the previous iteration displayed a 0 time to fall asleep, but began recording time in bed if it detected sleep without prior movement.  That is to say:  if I went to bed at 11:13 and fell asleep at 11:21, it would show me as awake/restless around 11:15, and asleep around 11:21.  This suggests the Fitbit can detect that I'm not up and wandering about (active, moving), and detect that I've fallen asleep, and was actively identifying when I went to bed.

Based on your statement, I would conjecture that the "bug" with it always displaying 0 time to fall asleep occurred because nobody at Fitbit made the connection and identified that time in bed leading up to the first minute asleep was the time spent trying to fall asleep--i.e. the people at Fitbit had a different understanding of how the automatic sleep tracker works, probably based on how they intended it to work, and didn't take notice that it actually does detect bed time separate from sleep time and thus automatically detects time to fall asleep.  That's an opportunity risk:  it turns out the tracker is capable of doing something useful it wasn't designed to do.

The feature request thread had a voting mechanism for the total thread.  I will, however, roll back my prior statement that Fitbit has closed its ears entirely, since you appear to be listening to the feedback now and attempting to remediate the situation.  The action you took gave the impression that you simply don't want to hear it.

[Sue0558]

I am more than a little annoyed that the sleep efficiency is not shown.  The new version is nowhere near as good as the old one, don't understand why it needed to be changed.

[Metabolitron]

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@MatthewFitbit wrote:

@MatthewFitbitIs it true that we are never going to get the sleep efficiency percentage back? 

I didn't say or hear anything like that. All this feedback is getting relayed, and I have made it clear to the team that Sleep Efficiency is the most commonly mentioned feature in this thread.

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What?!  You said it specifically and unequivocally.

In the feature suggestion "Restore pre-3/28/2017 sleep tracking functionality" you said:

"We aren't planning to revert this change"

I get trying to be a good corporate soldier and everything, but not telling the truth is a step too far.

https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Feature-Suggestions/Restore-pre-3-28-2017-sleep-tracking-functionali...

[MatthewFitbit]

@Metabolitron I simply stated that we aren't planning to revert to the previous sleep page. I didn't say that the features mentioned in this thread won't be incorporated into this new design. That's the whole point of gathering this feedback.

[Metabolitron]

Then I guess I have to be a little curious as to why you didn't gather that feedback before you deployed the page.

I looked around for Fitbit asking "Community" members for our input on what features we would like to see preserved in a software product update but didn't see anything.  Perhaps you could link to it.

[MatthewFitbit]

@Metabolitron I don't have insight on how these decisions were made, but I understand your point and have included it in the report of feedback to the team.

[durango]

My wife and I both have fitbit and are mad that the sleep percentage has been removed.  I am looking for a competitors watch now. 

[MatthewFitbit]

I really want to keep this discussion open so that we can have a constructive dialogue. However, we've had to remove quite a few posts as being inflammatory or off-topic. Please remember that the Community Guidelines apply here, and that your posts should follow those guidelines.

Remember to keep your posts considerate and on-topic, so that we can keep this thread productive.

[Hollyp67]

There are some of us who liked the sleep effectiveness would like it back. Why was it removed ?

[JuliaProf]

As evident by the frustration from users, the newer interface is really not useful!

Why take the sleep efficiency away? 

[Aurelie1947]

I have a  fitbit One and I'm so mad that the sleep percentage and graph has been removed.

Words cannot express my frustration with this change.

I am looking for a competitors replacements now. 

“Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair”

[CJ-ISU]

You have accurately captured the complaints I have. Please revert to the old sleep tracker till these complaints are addressed. 

[annefromchicago]

I agree with the comments that have been posted so far and want to emphasize the need to bring back the sleep efficiency %.  I have serious sleep issues, and the % of sleep helps me simply guage which sleep-tactics are working better than others.

Please bring it back.

Thank you

[bluefoxicy]

@MatthewFitbit Your point that you don't have personal involvement in product development is valid; I've directed criticism at the support and moderation staff for their own shortcomings, and tried to keep the technical context directed away from the people on the front line.

As for "inflammatory posts", I've seen a range of ire here.  People have posted everything from that support is utterly-unhelpful to claiming they're staffed with the lowest-paid, least-educated cretins the company can find (which is really unfair; maybe they're simply inexperienced and put under pressures like having their time in calls taken as a performance metric—we don't know if these people are rewarded for short calls and punished for long calls).  They've even continued to file that complaint while I was writing this.

Obviously, those criticisms range from civil to not-so-civil.

These complaints arise because the tone of support ranges from dismissive to condescending.  Approximately every single person in the world is most-concerned with how they're treated, even though interfacing with another human being is extremely-temporary.

People want to feel important, and instead they get a distinctly-familiar impression from Fitbit support.  This is especially true when support representatives make obviously-boilerplate statements about the changes being driven by user feedback which nobody can attest to having provided, or see a mechanism for Fitbit to have measured—in which case support is obviously lying, although we don't know if they're trained to make those statements in response to specific categories of inquiries.  It doesn't matter; the customer feels like they're being ignored and passed off, and becomes angry.

Your company will be hailed as a top-tier, best-of-breed business if it screws up technically at every corner but brings users to believe they're important and moves to fix those screw-ups.  If you do the best job in the industry but misstep on public relations, you'll be permanently marked as one of the worst-run, lowest-grade suppliers in your market, with every technical hickup—however minor—seen as another example of how little you care about your users.

In other words:  inflammatory posts are mainly because people perceive support as trying to shuffle them through the queue and get them out of their hair.  There are bad customers; but a surge in negative customer sentiment is generally your fault.  It doesn't help matters when people aren't allowed to comment on the poor handling of support without being told they're being inflammatory and having their posts removed.

It's important to keep order; this is most-effectively accomplished by working to understand why there is disorder.  If the problem seems to get worse when you talk, look for a communications problem—you would be surprised how many problems are simply communications failures.

Since my own communications abilities are pretty crap, I'll leave you with some reading material and hope you can fold new knowledge into your daily activities, or convince management to do things the right way.  You might notice I'm pretty bad at this; I need review and study, but I'm also schizoid and don't actually care about social connections.  I mainly want to get things done, and need technical goals rather than friends.

• How to Win Friends and Influence People, the audiobook.  The gold standard.  This is context for dealing with people.  Avoid the "in the Digital Age" version.  Necessary read—for approximately everyone.
• A Sixth Sense for Project Management, in hardcover.  This is the soft-skills book for the new knowledge area of Stakeholder Management.  Less-necessary, although you might find it interesting.
• Managing Project Stakeholders, also in hardcover.  This is the problem today.  If you want to know what happened here, read this book cover-to-cover.  These people out here throwing chairs and making angry posts?  They're your stakeholders.  Somebody at Fitbit didn't properly manage project stakeholders—they didn't include us—and the project failed.

That last one is the technical reason for today's angry phone calls and sternly-written letters.

I put in a FR to roll back the change because the people who actually use the sleep tracking functionality don't want to use the product you delivered.  At the very least, the option to use the old version should have been kept, so you can gather metrics on how many users are switching back; instead, Fitbit seems to have decided on leaving users stranded with something they don't want.

Maybe you'll get it sorted in a month and roll all the old features back in.  In the mean time, users will feel more and more that their needs are ignored and that they are unimportant.  Many have already announced that we're delaying purchases of newer trackers, or not planning to purchase them at all, or simply moving to another product because we don't have any consumer confidence in Fitbit as a company anymore.  By forcing this new, unaccepted deliverable onto users until you can remediate their concerns, you are pushing them to solidify those decisions—and pushing more users to work their way away from the Fitbit product line.

That is what stakeholder management is about.  That's what hasn't been done here.  That's why the project failed, delivering its product only to receive a hail of stones and debris as users attempt to chase you off and take back what they had before.

As I said:  this is all internal and not under your control as support.  Unfortunately, as support, you're our channel to tell the company what they're doing wrong.  I don't make a habit of shooting the messenger, but I do occasionally recommend you lean a little out of the way when the pitchforks and torches start coming; at times like this, you want to be as much of a conduit as you can.  If they want you to be PR, they can pay you more.

[mwilly68]

Why change what was working great to begin with?  I have liked everything with the online dashboard up until now. My sleep score was one of the things that I looked at everyday and now it is not there, and this makes it easier to think about looking at other trackers that are on the market.  BAD MOVE!!!