Simplify Garmin Connect mobile application
user research
ux & ui design
side project
ℹ️
This is a fictional project I made because I use and love my Garmin watch a lot and I felt like there was room for improvements in the mobile application. I don’t have the full context of Garmin teams and I don’t pretend to do better than them! The feedbacks I read and got from Garmin users were pretty positive :)
Increase mobile app usage to drive brand retention
Note: this start point is fictional
Garmin wants to create a strong emotional attachment between their devices and users, so that people stay with Garmin when they buy a new watch or GPS device. They know that a lot of this attachment is related to the device itself, but they feel like the mobile application Garmin Connect could play a bigger role here.
A statistic does not please Garmin stakeholders:
50%
of users open the application only after uploading a new activity, and never between two activities
Garmin wants to open a research project about this to improve this metric and therefore help the company key result including in the global strategy:
My goal here is to increase the mobile application usage (the product outcome) to drive customer retention and meet the company key result above (the business outcome).
Methods
We want to know:
Why 50% of users don’t open the app between two activities
How could we encourage users to use more the Connect app
To help us discover this, I drove several research:
first, I read the App Store and Google Play reviews to have an overview of users' satisfaction
then I scanned some reddit threads to dig into some users questions and feedbacks
with this material and my assumptions, I could define a user interview guide and I drove 4 semi-guided interviews to understand how users use the app, their motivations and frustrations
About the interviews
I interviewed 4 participants (names have been changed):
James, 30, living in Bordeaux - expert user
John, 35, living in Metz - intermediate user
Emily, 40, living in Le Mans - intermediate user
Edward, 37, living in Angers - neophyte user
I prepared a list of questions and then conducted the interview for 30 to 45min. I wanted to know how they use sports app in general and what were their pain points with the Garmin app, I asked a few questions about:
how often do they do sports
for which sports they track their activities
if they use other tracking apps and why
why they track their activities, what are their motivations
how they use their devices and Garmin Connect application
their opinion about the app, their frustrations, etc.
etc.
Raw insights
Organized insights
Key learnings
After organizing the feedbacks I got, I extracted the key learnings of my interviews.
The app is seen as a very complete and useful app…
… but also seems to be quite complex with a lot of information
Navigation is not intuitive and people have troubles finding most important information (important data is available but not always displayed at the right place)
Competition and rewards seem to be great levers to motivate people doing sport and use the app
How might we?
⭐️
How might we help neophite and intermediate sporties easily find the information they need while keeping the app as completed as it is for the experts?
Success metric
The main KPI we want to improve is:
More than 50% of the users open the app between two sport activities
We can also monitor this metric: user satisfaction increases about the app.
Exploring solutions
Benchmark
Strava makes a great job displaying a lot of information but with focusing on the most important ones first.
Compared to these apps, Garmin Connect seems a bit old-fashion and compact and it may interfere with readability.
Mockups and prototype
My goal was not to redesign the entire app here so I decided to focus on the main screens related to my “How Might We”:
homepage and navigation (simplification, focus on what is more important)
activity pages (with a first section helping every one get the main information and an access to more detailed data)
profile pages (to simplify and highlight levels and badges)
I also used these evolutions to try a new visual design for the app, because I got some feedbacks that it was not very friendly. It might be too far from the Garmin brand guidelines to I also made a version with current colors (see last screens).
Homepage and “More” navigation item. I highlighted the last activity and reorganized the “more” list to simplify it
Activity page: I focused on the most important data on the first page and allowed expert to go deeper with the “See full data” CTA
Advanced data for one activity
Profile pages is splitted into three sections: your profile, your stats and your activities
If you are into the levels and badges game, you can access these pages from your profile
A second UI test with current Garmin Connect colors