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I next tried to add my food which I see has been replaced by a new experience.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.
