Garmin Connect App

Role → UX Designer

Timeline → January - May 2018

Team → Purdue Experience Design Studio

Client → Garmin

01

Project Overview 🔍

Ask

Garmin designs and builds products that enhance people’s lives. Gear is a feature within the Garmin Connect mobile app that allows users to add gear, such as shoes and bikes, to the activities they record within the app.  We were tasked to improve Gear’s functionality and discoverability in order to increase usage.

Timeline

This was a semester long project that I was a part of during my experience studio ux course at Purdue University. The duration was 4 months and we followed the following timeline over the course of the project.

Role & Responsibilities

We had 8 team members on this project with 2 co-leads. I worked very closely with the leads and the rest of the team throughout the project process, from user research, to ideation, to creating hi-fidelity designs, to validating our final designs through user testing .

02

The Problem ⚠️

Our team observed that the Gear feature lacked discoverability within the Garmin Connect app, which prevented users from integrating it’s valuable functionality into their fitness routines.

So how can we improve the user experience to make Gear more successful based on A/B testing and success rate of discoverability?

03

The Solution 🚀

We created high fidelity mockups that address five specific problems that we decided on with our sponsors, while also giving the Garmin Connect App a more clean aesthetic.

The five issues we located and changed were:

  1. Filtering gear

  2. Adding new gear

  3. Viewing all gear

  4. Placing gear in the bottom menu bar

  5. Onboarding.

As you’ll read below in the section that discusses testing, these mockups resulted in a 100% increase in discoverability of the Gear feature within the Garmin Connect mobile application.

04

The Landscape 🗺️

We began by conducting competitive analysis on applications that accomplished similar gear-tracking and run-tracking  capabilities as Garmin Connect. We identified and evaluated the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities of these competing apps to finding ways to improve the Garmin connect platform.

Results

Takeaways

  • Suggesting brand and model suggestions offloads stress about knowing specific model names from users

  • It’s important to have a clear, straightforward paths to finding gear

  • Flexibility in adding, editing, and removing gear maximizes user customization

05

Heuristic Analysis 📝

We used Nielsen’s Heuristics to conduct heuristic evaluations on both the web and mobile platform of Garmin Connect to gain a better understanding of the app and identify possible usability issues within the user interface.

Takeaways

  • The gear feature is not well advertised enough in the app, especially in the home screen when creating an activity.

  •  User is unable to set his/her default Gear by choice. Instead, the app automatically detects multiple gears and sets the most recent one as the default.

06

Primary Research 📊

Surveys

We conducted a survey among hikers, runners, and cyclists, via Facebook to understand our user’s needs within their exercises and usage of the Garmin Connect App. We mapped out a path for each of these user types, which came to about 24 questions per participant.

Who took the survey?

Targeted 45-55 aged Garmin users and received 454 responses

Takeaways

User Interviews

We conducted qualitative interviews with runners who responded to the survey we sent out in order to gain a deeper understanding of users' knowledge of the Gear feature and find additional possible pain points in the Garmin Connect experience. Questions surrounded the users' routines, Garmin usage, and their typical flow.

Who we interviewed?

5 active runners who discovered gear by exploring the Garmin Connect App

Takeaways

07

The Users 👥

We started this project off with three user groups (hikers, runners, and cyclists but after receiving and reviewing our survey results, we chose to remove hikers from our user group, narrowing down our user group to runners and cyclists. Of our 454 survey responses, only about 10 of those were from hikers. We came to the conclusion that continuing with hikers as a main focus could deter from our overall process and findings.

08

Ideation & Iteration 🧠

Having most of our research done and ideas flowing from the discovered issues and areas for improvement, we began to brainstorm and explore possibilities of integration and visibility for Gear.

Some of our initial ideas

Some of our ideas from ideation round 2

For our second and third round of ideation we did a carousel activity, where we passed around a sketch book with specific category and ideated within that frame. Our goal was to narrow into Garmin recommended activities, increase discoverability of the gear feature and create a more visual appealing and interactive application.

Realignment

After speaking with our sponsors at Garmin, we decided to focus on the following five aspects of Gear for the remainder of our project:


1. Gear's overall aesthetic

2. Inputting Gear through the fill out form

3. Adding Gear to the Blue "Activity Bar"

4. Cultivating a new understanding of Gear

5. Creating a Genesis State with an onboarding experience

We moved from wireframes into high fidelity mockups, which tested after. Our goal was to create high-fidelity mockups to address the five different problems we finalized following our sponsor meeting and to give a cleaner aesthetic to the Garmin Connect app.

Hi-Fi Designs📱

09

Onboarding

We identified that the original screen doesn't help a novice user understand the core functionality of the gear feature nor does it guide them on how to use it.

Our design on the other hand gives users a brief run through of its key functionalities and how to get started. 

The blue bar

Gear has been added to the Blue Bar on the user’s My Day screen. This brings awareness to the feature by taking it out the ‘More’ section of the app (lower right button of the menu).

Add gear

Created new, more intuitive and defined ways to customize data about a piece of Gear. Added 'default' button to allow better integration of Gear into daily routines.

All gear

Updated the Gear view to Garmin Connect's new aesthetic. Increased ease of information access from the general Gear collection view and created a filter system to search through owned Gear.

A/B Testing

We conducted A/B testing to see how our design compares. The first scenario included the previous Garmin Connect Application and the second was with our final solution. 

Participants

7-10 participants tested each scenario. The participants were timed and the number of clicks were recorded.

Scenario 2

Check your most recent run to see if the Brooks Transcend 6 is listed as the default Gear. 

User Testing 🧪

10

Scenario 1

Navigate to the gear function within Garmin Connect Mobile

Impact

A moment to reflect…

In the end, we created a new look and feel for the Gear functionality within Garmin Connect Mobile in the hopes that more users will incorporate it into their fitness routines, now being able to locate it more easily within the application.

🖍️ Ideate early
Our team engaged in multiple ideation sessions throughout the project, and through each session we developed more concrete solutions that aligned with our problem statement. Earlier ideation allows for more ideation as time progresses, so starting as early as possible — even if that involves small napkin sketches — is important in refining one's ideas.

🙌🏼 Teamwork is everything
Our team was super kind to allow everyone to express what they want to learn and practice certain areas of design. I got to explore and work on my visual and interaction design skills more deeply. Having considerate team members really makes you want to come to work every single day!

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