9to5Google Log Out: Before new features, Fitbit needs to modernize and redesign its apps

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Fitbit upset more than a few users by removing Challenges and open groups yesterday with only a vague promise that “new features” are coming. The company is clearly undergoing a transition as it fully integrates with Google.

In terms of what’s coming next, we know that you’ll be able to use Fitbit with a Google Account “sometime in 2023.” A minor redesign of app navigation was teased last fall and possibly shown off, but that hasn’t launched. There’s a much broader question about what the service should focus on and offer, but before that the app needs a basic modernization.

Today’s Fitbit app is quite old with nearly all stats located in the “Today” tab. How this main feed is organized has not changed in quite some time. The primary stats of steps, distance, floors, zone minutes, and calories are found at the top of the feed with users able to pick which one gets central/largest billing. This is followed by rearrangeable cards, with sleep and exercise resizable to offer more stats at a glance.

There’s some low-hanging fruit for Fitbit to tackle now that they’re owned by Google:

Dark theme: Fitbit desperately needs an alternative to the blindingly bright background. For example, waking up in the morning and groggily checking the app for sleep stats is an annoying and uncomfortable experience due to the lack of a dark mode. Dark themes are simply a bare necessity for apps today.

Dynamic Color: Fitbit does not look or function like a Google app. One little nitpick is how the profile avatar is located at the top-left instead of the top-right corner, while some pages appear to just be web views. Adopting Material You and Dynamic Color would start to address some of those concerns.

Widgets: Another step towards being a good first-party Android app would be new widgets. The ones available today show their age, with Fitbit’s existing Wear OS Tiles being a good template for minimum functionality.

Large screen support: Fitbit on tablets just letterboxes the phone app. Years ago, the Fitbit Dashboard on the web felt quite glanceable a la Windows 8 tiles.

More glanceable stats: While you can already pick up key information while scrolling the Today tab, there’s still a lot of underused space as the cards usually just show a single score/number/metric. Showing more graphs in the feed would be a great start, with Wear OS Tiles coming to mind as the kind of functionality needed. Another good example is Google Fit with its info-dense main feed.

Integrate Health Metrics: The Health Metrics card to “view your trends” is just a shortcut that takes you to another page. It’s basically another Fitbit Today and feels disconnected from the other stats. With Fitbit dropping the Premium requirement, breathing rate, heart-rate variability (HRV), skin temperature, oxygen saturation (SpO2), and resting heart rate (RHR) need to stop being abstracted and be offered in the main feed.

Health / wearable companion apps should be a design playground. There’s a lot of information to be displayed and there are many ways to go about it. As Google overhauls Fitbit for the long run, it needs a good foundation. Now, with the Pixel Watch launched, is as good a time as any to demonstrate its software commitment to the service by modernizing the look and feel of how most people interact with Fitbit.

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