Public Preview Issues

[AndyE]

I’m sorry for the rant, but need to vent my frustration about the general direction of the Fitbit app. There seems to be a continued effort to dumb down the app. The last time you guys made changes, you replaced what was a highly customisable dashboard with a ‘cleaner’ interface. Whilst the effort was appreciated, the implementation was terrible. The information displayed now required more space, and for some reason that I just cant fathom, you decided to provide the new widgets in groups. It was so irritating that individual stats could not be re-ordered. In the old setup, every stat had its own widget and you could decided what was important to you. Why don’t you allow/trust users to prioritise whats right for them.

This brings me to the new public preview. I know this is a ‘preview’, but it concerns me about whats coming. All I can see is even more dumbing down. The new dashboard made me think at first glance that it ‘looked nice’, but then when i tried to customise, I saw there was just 1 widget and just 4 stats. And the stats that are currently available don’t include calories consumed or water intake, and I’m sure theres more.

From what I can see to date, some widgets also get added dynamically, but why doest the user retain control over what they see.

I next tried to add my food which I see has been replaced by a new experience. The barcode scanner is gone, as is all the nutrient & macro information. For a fitness band, this is essential and I’m just aghast that someone thinks that users don’t need this stuff.

I eventually managed to find my food intake under the ‘health’ menu, nested under ‘focus areas’ under ‘nutrition’, then ‘calories intake’, then I had to switch to ‘Day’ view. What a sequence! In the production version of the app, I just click the ‘cal’ stat on the dashboard and I’m in the food menu.

When adding food, you also can see important information like brands when adding food. The macros of food varies massively depending on brand, and excluding this information really hurts this functionality.

It feels like the new design is more about presentation than function. It does look like you have pulled out lots of stats, which is potentially useful, but the layout, organisation & customisation of these leaves a lot to be desired.

And I saw in another post about the barcode scanner that Google doesn’t provide a roadmap or dates? Well thats a concern if you’re going to not be clear about any functionality that will be dropped. I hope the ‘preview’ is very previewy, and that there is more of a plan here, because after the last major update, the app became worse and I fear whats next.

[pbaines]

Agree with all this. Very disappointed with the direction that nutrition features are going in the preview. 

Looks like the food plan feature (dynamic calorie deficit) isn't going to be implemented. That's one of Fitbit's smartest nutrition features. It should be in the preview as a top feature. 

[jmfrahm]

Where did the Family and Group functions go? I use Fitbit to motivate myself and my kids to stay active. If this disappears in the final version, I'll have less incentive to stick with Fitbit. 

[RiekoC]

Hello @jmfrahm 

Although Groups will be going away according to this help page (<-- click), you'll still be able to be able to compete with Family & Friends in the weekly leader board. 

Unfortunately, that seems to be all the info we have for now. 

[toocu2000]

I just got an email about the new app today, and I'm concerned as well feeling this is more dumbed down, less morivational.  I too, like to log my food and water.  

I like tracking certain stats, but there's certain info I don't want to share. This app isn't a substitute for a doctor or health tests. 

I want to track my steps, distance, weight, calories, water intake.  I use a different app to track my sleep, which I've used for 13 years. 

If I'm forced to use this new Google Health, I may end up canceling my Premium membership. Feeling like Google is getting too much up in my business these days.

[AndyE]

By Way of an update, I can see some improvements, but there are more improvements needed to the user experience:

1. You can now add more stats to the dashboard/home screen and even have multiple pages of stats, however, you can't re-order, so if you don't like the layout, you have to wipe the whole thing a build it again.
2. The dashboard layout is stored on the device, not synced, so if I have multiple devices, the layout seems to have to be customised on each device
3. The tiles on the 'Health' tab can be shown or hidden. but they can be reordered.

When logging food, the new process has several usability deficiencies compared to the previous version:

1. You can't log food ahead of when it's consumed i.e. later in the day. I like to plan meals and sometimes put the food in in advance. The old version of the app works, so why doesn't the new app allow this. I can't think of a good reason why this would be blocked.
2. When searching for food, the 'Frequent', 'Recent' & 'Custom' options are missing. Each of these options had a purpose and speeded up data entry, but are now missing
3. When adding food using the + symbol, some visual feedback that something has happened would be useful.
4. The nutrition facts link is no longer available. This was useful when checking you had selected the right food & values (manufacturer, calories, fat, protein etc) and also pro-rated the values when adjusting the serving size
5. Speaking of serving size, there doesn't seem to be a way to change the 'Portion size'. It seems to be stuck depending on the food choice whish is annoying, especially when you don't actually know how much a 'serving' actually is. This worked on the previous version and was very useful in conjunction with the 'nutrition facts' information.
6. When you are adding food, there used to be a 'Log and add more' option in addition to the 'Log' option. The lack on the 'Log and add more' option slows down entry in to the app. Nearly every meal is a combination of items, so making it slower to log them is very frustrating.
7. When logging items in iOS, a 'Food Logged' overlay appears that you can't dismiss (it only has an 'Food Logged' clickable link)
8. When removing items in iOS, a 'Food and drink removed' overlay appears that you can't dismiss (it only has an 'undo' clickable link)
9. When deleting item in iOS, it looks like the food was removed from the log, but the UI does not always update unless the app is closed and reopened or sometime a sync seem to fix.
10. The days food list is displayed linearly with 'tabs' to filter on Android. The grouping mechanism on iOS is nice, but it hides the food and makes it more difficult to see what's been logged. What about keeping the iOS design, but making the group expanded by default & finding a way to make the group total more distinct with something like a darker shade of grey.

This is no exhaustive, but things that I've seen or am frustrated with.