Garmin Gear Redesign
An effective remake of Garmin's Gear functionality within the Garmin Connect mobile app
Collaborated with Garmin
OVERVIEW 🔍
Project Overview
Garmin designs and builds products that enhance people’s lives. Gear is a feature within the Garmin Connect mobile application that allows users to add gear, such as shoes and bikes, to the activities they record within the app. Garmin Connect will then track the total distance associated with the gear and notifies the user when it has reached capacity. A user can retire and add more gear whenever necessary.
PROBLEM 🚀
The Problem
Our team observed that the Gear feature was not discoverable within the Garmin Connect app, which prevented users from integrating the valuable functionality into their fitness routines. So, how might we improve Gear so that the feature is more successful based on A/B testing and success rate of discoverability?
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THE SOLUTION 🚀
Final Design
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 filtering gear, adding new gear, viewing all gear, placing gear in the bottom menu bar, and 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.
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SECONDARY RESEARCH 📚
Comparing what's out there
We began by conducting competitive analysis on applications that accomplished similar gear-tracking and run-tracking capabilities as Garmin Connect, to identify and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of Garmin Connect Mobile’s competition while finding ways to improve the 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 path to finding gear
• Flexibility in adding, editing, and removing gear maximizes user customization
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HEURISTIC ANALYSIS 📝
Identifying areas for improvement
We used Nielsen’s Heuristics to conduct heuristic analysis on both the web and mobile platform of Garmin Connect to gain a better understanding of the Garmin Connect application and help identify possible usability problems 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 or her default Gear by choice. Instead, the app automatically detects multiple gears and sets the most recent one as the default.
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SURVEY 📊
Asking our user group
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 Garmin users, 454 responses, aged 45-55
Takeaways
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BRAINSTORMING AND IDEATION 🧠
Writing down our ideas
Having most of our research done and ideas flowing from the discovered issues and areas for improvement, we began to ideate and explore possibilities of integration and visibility for Gear.
Some of our initial ideas
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USER GROUPS 👫🏻
New users
After receiving and reviewing our survey results, we chose to remove hikers from our user group. 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.
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PRIMARY RESEARCH 🤝
Interviewing Garmin's users
We conducted qualitative interviews with runners who responded the qualitative survey to gain deeper understanding of users' knowledge of the Gear feature and find additional possible pain points in the Garmin Connect experience. Questions were about users' routines, Garmin usage, and their typical flow.
Who we interviewed
5 interviewees, All active runners who discovered gear by exploring the Garmin Connect App
Takeaways
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IMPORTANT PART OF THE DESIGN PROCESS 👊🏻
Refining our ideas
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.
Some of our ideas from Ideation Round 2
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
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HIGH FIDELITY PROTOTYPES📱
Creating high-fidelity prototypes
We moved from wire-framing into high fidelity mockups, which we would then test. Our goal was to create high-fidelity mockups to address the five different problems finalized following our previous sponsor meeting and to give a cleaner aesthetic to the Garmin Connect app.
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 of its hiding in the ‘More’ section of the app (lower right button).
Add gear
Created new, more intuitive and defining 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.
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A/B TESTING 🔍
Using A/B Testing to see how our design compares
We conducted A/B testing using two scenarios, including the previous Garmin Connect Application and our final solution.
Participants
7-10 participants tested each scenario. The participants were timed and the number of clicks were recorded.
Scenario One
Navigate to the gear function within Garmin Connect Mobile
Scenario Two
Check your most recent run to see if the Brooks Transcend 6 is listed as the default Gear.
Takeaways
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CONCLUSION 💭
Wrapping up the project
This semester we worked to improve Gear in Garmin Connect Mobile. We found that Gear was undiscoverable which was hindering the user's from using Gear. Through research, it was uncovered that the user's who did use Gear were unaware of all of its capabilities. Through these insights, we created new designs for Gear. The new designs helped to ensure that users would be able to find and use the function with ease. Through ideation, we also created features for Garmin to consider designing and implementing in the future.
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.
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REFLECTION 💭
🖍️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.
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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MEET THE DREAM TEAM ✨
Garmin x Purdue University
Abbee, Will, Hunter, Rheaa, Drake, Amelia, Isa (That's me!), Patty, Austin
